Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

October 31, 1967. ON AN EARLY GENITAL PHASE, WITH AN ADDENDUM ON GENESIS. Herman Roiphe, M.D.

After summarizing certain views of sexual development, the author stated: 'The most generally accepted theory of the development of sexuality is that the two sexes develop in much the same way until the onset of the phallic phase at about three years, at which time children of both sexes would seem to be little boys. The child's observation of the anatomic differences between the sexes and the consequent castration complex in the context of the Oedipal triangle have a fateful impact on the by now divergent lines of male and female sexual development.' Freud observed that the early attachment to the mother continued into the phallic phase and in some cases was never relinquished. Other investigators have reported evidence of genital sensations in little girls in the second year of life which are associated with oral and anal phase development. Anna Freud has reported penis envy in girls between eighteen and twenty-four months. Greenacre has described the possibility of 'early vague awareness of the vagina's influenced by oral stimulation and frustration resulting in 'distortions of the regular sequence of preoedipal development'. The author suggests that these observations are contrary to our present developmental concepts and that there is a regularly occurring normal genital phase that appears between eighteen and twenty-four months of age. He said: 'The specific dynamic content of this phase concerns itself with questions of self and object representation and is free of any Oedipal resonance'. He then reported clinical data from the treatment of a three-and-a-half-year-old pseudo-autistic psychotic girl.

Roiphe thinks that a variety of severe neuroses in women can be understood in terms of the child's reactions to the observation of genital differences. Many such patients have major disturbances in the early mother-child relationship in the first year and a hal