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In his pioneering work “Three essays on the theory of sexuality” (1905), Freud deals with the sexual development of the child and with the differences occurring between the sexes. He describes the famous psychosexual stages of development, which in the case of the oral and anal stages are quite similar in the two sexes. Differences begin to occur in the phallic-oedipal phase and continue thenceforth. According to Freud, the basic differences at this time are the girl's age-specific feeling of inferiority due to her lack of visible genitalia, with the consequent penis envy, and the boy's phallic sense of superiority, combined, however, with a worry about being damaged, i.e., castration anxiety. After this stage, the sexes show divergent development, of which the oedipal triangle with its specific features is within the scope of the present paper. For later developments, particularly in the case of the girl, cf., e.g., Bernstein (1983), Kestenberg (1968) and Plaut & Hutchinson (1986).
Somewhat earlier, Freud, through Breuer, had become acquainted with another interesting phenomenon, that of transference (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895). While treating Miss Anna O, Breuer became the object of intensive erotic feelings, which perplexed him and made him give up experimenting with a technique similar to that of psychoanalysis. Freud, however, continued his research and found this rapid falling in love as being of great theoretical interest; on the basis of these phenomena, he developed his important hypothesis dealing with transference. Since then, transference has been a major subject of research in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and