The Feminine Self and Body Image

What primarily attracts the attention of the analyst while listening to the analysand are the emotions surging to fill the analysand's mind, stemming from the conflicts and failures he is attempting to suppress. This is how Freud (1924) found the extraordinary significance of castration anxiety, and in outlining the psychology of woman came to the conclusion that penis envy was the most important of her problems. He realized that in order to develop into womanhood, the girl has to abandon the wish for a penis, and that this very process of abandoning, constructs femininity. According to the classical theory (Freud 1931, 1933; Deutsch 1925, 1930), a woman who has come to terms with her castration has a passive masochistic personality. It is understandable that criticism flares up immediately, and that discussion in this field of psychoanalytic literature is rampant.

Taking a look at Freud's conception of woman (1925, 1931, 1933), we find that in his opinion, the girl is like a boy in the earliest phase of childhood. She has to become aware of her deficiency by discovering the difference between the sexes, implying the fact that she lacks a penis. In Freud's view, the clitoris represents a penis, and he sees it as a masculine sexual organ. The girl can have sexual experiences only by means of her clitoris, and disappointed with its inferior size in comparison with the penis, she gives up masturbation at the age of four years. She then grows up without feminine libido until puberty when the vagina begins to give rise to sensations.

The girl has to change from mother to father as her love object. In Freud's opionion, this takes place when the girl, disappointed with mother who has not given her a penis, turns in anger to father. He has the organ she admires. “The girl is driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and she enters the Oedipus