The Concept of Penis Envy Revisited: A Child Analyst Listens to Adult Women

Current psychoanalytic scholarship concerning gender development rejects recognition of the genital difference, or “penis envy,” as central to the construction of “femininity,” substituting the concept of “primary femininity.” This shift in the paradigm of gender construction has occurred in part because of contributions from child-observational research showing that “gender identity” is acquired by age three. It has also been stimulated by the observations of adult analysts that interpretations organized around the concept of penis envy appear to have little mutative value in contrast to the communications in play and action from the analyses of preschool girls, which seem to reflect intense intrapsychic conflict stimulated by the girls’ recognition of the genital difference. Using clinical material, this paper contrasts fantasies of gender found in oedipal girls with those presented in the analyses of adult women. The differences reflect not only the vicissitudes of gender construction and developmental changes in the mind’s capacity to adapt to the demands of reality but also the fate of aggressive and narcissistic derivatives as they become entangled in conflict created by recognition of the inherent limitations of the body. The fantasies referred to by the concept “penis envy”are not constitutive of femininity; however, they reflect one approach to a defensive solution to intrapsychic dilemmas stemming from awareness of bodily and generational limits.