The Role of Mental Representation of the Genitalia: A Contribution to Female Sexuality

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology (Freud, 1926, p. 212).

I feel that a little girl's primary sexual problem is inability to conceptualize her genitalia. The resultant confusion engenders fear of body injury, encountered as fear of perforation. Patients' comments, familiar to every analyst, suggest this lack of internal ego boundaries: “The penis will get into my abdomen,” “I will be split open,” “I will get hurt internally.” These expressions are often classified “primitive fears.” I think, rather, that they really indicate lack of knowledge of “What's inside my body” or “What I am like inside.”

When the confusion is too great and is compounded by a strong punitive superego, a little girl may find the task of resolving the problem of “feminine mystique” insoluble and turn away from it—lose interest in her genitalia, deny their existence, or develop penis envy which then becomes a defense against the mystery of the vagina. “We have, after all,” as Freud (1931) stated, “long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual development” (p. 226). Thus, in exploring the “dark continent,” I offer the hypothesis that crucial to a woman's psychosexual development is the necessity that she increase her awareness of her genitalia so that she will give up denial of them and the consequent pyramiding of problems such denial entails. An understanding

of mental representation and of the role of visual perception in it are basic to the development and clinical application of this thesis, as is some consideration of orgastic response and penis envy.

The female has serious difficulties, first, in perceiving, and second, in forming, a complete mental representation of her genitalia. This is in stark contrast to the m