Mastering Envy: From Freud's Narcissistic Wounds to Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds to a Vision of Healing

“We are hardly in need of proof that men stand in awe of the procreative power of women, that they wish to participate in it, and that both emotions are found readily in Western society. … My own purpose was to show that some preliterate societies, far from being inferior to us in this respect, made the spontaneous move from the negative experience of fear to the positive experience of mastering it—by trying to make women's power their own.” Symbolic Wounds,

Bruno Bettelheim thought it patently clear that men stand in awe of women's procreative power, and that it required only adequate argument to show that this primitive emotion was better handled in preliterate societies than in our own. In Symbolic Wounds, subtitled Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, he sets out to show that the pubertal rites surrounding preliterate societies are adaptive behaviors satisfying deep instinctual desires on the part of the pubescent child (male or female): desires to experience the sexuality of the other sex, while advancing the development of their own sexuality as male or female. Bettelheim had taken his cue from the seemingly bizarre behavior of the disturbed adolescents in the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago. These children initiated spontaneous rituals, willingly entered into by the boys, and sometimes initiated by the girls, which involved blood-letting, blood exchange, genital manipulation, and even mutilation, especially on the part of the boys. Freud and his psychoanalytic disciples had already taken note of the envy of some young girls for the male organ. Penis envy had become a central doctrine, one crucial to the Freudian account of female sexuality. The behavior Bettelheim