You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The data presented and the way a generalization of the hermaphroditic features of human life has been attempted in this paper are such that a discussion of them within this limited space is rather difficult. However, it should be remembered that in myths of many countries, we find mention of male and female parts of the body combined in one figure in different forms.
In India we have the Ardhanariswara (half male and half female) concept of the deity, in which the right half is that of Lord Shiva and the other half is that of his consort, Goddess Parbati. Again, in the Mahabharata, the epic of India, we have the story of the King, Bhangaswana, who once went out in the forest to hunt and saw a pond under the cool shade of trees. The tired king got down from his horse, bathed in the cool water, and was immediately transformed into a female. Thenceforth he(she) lived the life of a female and had no desire to change back to a male form.
From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, we shall have to consider whether, besides the distinct wishes for masculinity and femininity, there is a third wish for hermaphroditism. Dr. Rollman-Branch claims that adolescence marks this hermaphroditic state in our development, also, that up to the age of two and a half to three years, the child has no identification with either the male or the female. Whether this is true for children of some western countries, I cannot say, but from our analytic experience in India, we find it difficult to accept this statement as a universal truth.
Even at the present day, most people in India live in a modified extended family where no strictness with respect to covering the child's body is observed nor much privacy maintained while changing
clothes. Children, therefore, have opportunities to notice the differences in the sex organs long before the age mentioned above.
It is true that in some female cases penis envy becomes evident, as does breast envy in some males and in some females with undeveloped breas