Concerning the Sexuality of Woman12

During the phase of the normal Oedipus complex, we find that the child is tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while in its relations with the parent of the same sex hostility prevails. It is not difficult to understand what determines this attitude in the case of the boy. The first object of the boy's love was his mother; she remains the object, and as his erotic strivings develop and he becomes more aware of the relations which exist between his father and mother, his father necessarily becomes a rival. The situation is different in the case of the little girl. True, the first object of her love was also the mother. How is it then that she turns to her father? How, when, and why does she become detached from her mother? We have known for a long time that a woman's sexual development is complicated by the fact that she must abandon her originally dominant genital zone, the clitoris, in favor of a new zone, the vagina. Now it seems that another change of this order, the supplanting of her original object, the mother, by the father, is a no less characteristic and important feature of her sexual development. We cannot yet see clearly how these two processes are associated.

It is well known that many women (and not necessarily neurotic women) have a strong attachment to their father. It was on such women that I made the observations to be reported here, and from these observations arrived at a certain conception of female sexuality. In this connection, two facts seem to me particularly striking. The first is that the analysis of cases in which there was a very intense attachment to the father