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Both inside and outside the psychoanalytic community, Freud's ideas about female sexuality and femininity have attracted criticisms ever since he first wrote “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925b).
It is often assumed that these ideas have been discredited, particularly in regard to the central place Freud gives to penis envy in initiating femininity. If we take an international perspective the situation is not so simple, and the debate is still alive, certainly implicitly if not always explicitly. What the passage of time has highlighted is complexity rather than resolution.
The issue of whether femininity is biologically determined or whether it is constructed independently from biology still polarises perspectives, as it did at the time of the original Freud–Jones debate, as it came to be known. The importance of this issue goes beyond the topic of femininity to the conceptualisation of psychoanalytic theory in general, and of sexuality in particular.
Very roughly (though schemas cannot do justice to the complexity of ideas) the approaches divide geographically. British psychoanalysts have, on the whole, not been very interested in the topic since the original debate. Notable exceptions have been Gillespie (1969), Balint (1973), Burgner and Edgcumbe, (1975), Mitchell and Rose (1982), Laufer (1982, 1986) and Pines (1993), all of whom are outside the Kleinian group. Apart from the latter, implicitly they
have tended in the main to follow Klein's original position according to which there is always an unconscious knowledge of the vagina and internal space, and a natural heterosexuality.
Freud stressed the relative independence of the development of masculinity and femininity from biological sex. He disputed the naturalness of the heterosexual drive. This is clearest in the case of the girl whose heterosexuality he describes as developing, following a long homosexual phase in which the mother is the love object and in the