Discussion of Karolina Bein's Article, The Role of Mental Representation of the Genitalia: A Contribution to Female Sexuality

This paper focuses on factors influencing the psychological development of female sexuality, in particular on those interfering with the orgastic experience. In pursuing this question, Dr. Bein challenges some tacit assumptions in psychoanalytic thinking. In clear-cut and convincing language she argues that the psychological development of girls, their maturing into sexually responsive womanhood, needs to be understood positively, in terms of female development, and not as a negative, as a defective subspecies of male development.

These considerations represent such a basic biological principle, namely, that any organism by necessity can function only in its own terms, that the real puzzling aspect is that a forthright and clearly thought out statement is needed as late as 1971. Though this conclusion is self-evident, the tendency persists to interpret sexual problems in women in terms of “penis envy,” an approach that often fails to resolve the existing problems or even reinforces them. In contrast, emphasis on the discovery of a functioning female self has a constructive effect.

Dr. Bein feels that a girl's primary sexual problem is related to her inability to conceptualize her genitalia. This approach represents

a challenge to the notion that bodily sensations or disturbances in the experience of such sensations are innate or constitutionally determined. Dr. Bein conceives of a woman's dissatisfaction with her role not as inescapable but as the outcome of deficient learning experiences early in life. The girl in her development is handicapped by the invisibility of the vagina and by inhibitions such as “don't touch” that interfere with the development of awareness of sensations. I not only agree with Dr. Bein's emphasis on the importance of early learning experiences, but am inclined to go further. Early learning is necessary for mental organization not only of genital, but of other bodily sensations as well. This has been studied for the development of hunger a