A Contribution to the Education of a Parent

Various psychoanalytic studies that deal with the phallic phase in the girl, describe the difficulties that may hinder normal development at this period.2 Before the girl enters into the oedipus situation, the phallic phase has to be overcome; the ego has to give up its

masculine attitudes and accept the emergence of passive traits, as a necessary prerequisite for future feminine development. The discovery, in this phase, of the lack of a penis, which in the literature receives equal importance with the castration complex of the boy, creates psychological changes of great consequence in the girl's object-relations and in her libido position. In the normal course of events a change occurs in the object-relations, as the girl at first holds the mother, to whom so far all her libidinous inclinations have been addressed, responsible for the damage she feels she has suffered. She directs towards her, therefore, her strong negative feelings. Her interest now turns to the father. Disappointed with her own inferior organ, she abandons her previous actively directed phallic masturbation; and the aggressive tendencies become changed into passive tendencies. The girl wants her father to make up to her for the lost penis by giving her a child, and therefore all her sexual inclinations turn toward him. Her relationship to him becomes intense. The girl has grown into the oedipus situation: she becomes even more hostile to her mother, now her rival.