Early Female Sexuality

Abstract

Ernest Jones’s lecture ‘Early Female Sexuality’ was read before the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society on 24th April 1935 and published in English shortly afterwards. It was intended to inaugurate a dialogue between Vienna and London at a time when the divergences between the two psychoanalytic societies were prompting talk about two distinct schools. Somewhat ironically, this lecture also closes the debate on femininity. Jones starts his lecture with a list of points upon which Vienna and London disagree: the early development of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, the genesis of the super-ego and its relation to the Oedipus complex, the technique of child analysis, and the conception of a death instinct. He then sums up his position vis-a-vis Melanie Klein and the early Homey and proceeds to review the topics of main interest, noting the points of agreement and disagreement. The point of this is to ask two questions about early female development: Is the pre-oedipal stage a concentration on a single object, the mother? If so, is this a particularly masculine attitude? He answers these questions by opposing Freud, particularly with regard to the phallic phase. Like Klein, Jones posits a primary feminine phase which is incorporative and receptive. This phase is manifest in the early wish for a penis induced by oral frustration that is predicated upon the child’s oral conception of coitus. Jones notes that at this pre-oedipal stage the little girl is only concerned with the part object; she then turns towards her father near the end of her first year of life; and by the second year the Oedipus complex is established. The little girl’s sadistic attitude in regard to the contents of her mother’s body is explained in biologistic and object-relations terms. According to Jones, although all agree on the importance of the oral stage as the prototype of later femininity, two points remain obscure: the question of early vaginal sensations and what he terms the ‘clitoris-penis question’. He has three theories for the obscurity of the vagina in childhood, mostly inspired by Horney: fantasies relating to it are in sharp conflict with the rival mother; the vagina is the seat of the deepest anxieties; and the vagina has no physical function before puberty. For Jones the real problem is the motivation behind penis envy. Though he agrees with Horney that it arises from the auto-erotic wish for urethral pleasure, 276he argues for a theory of secondary motivation grounded in the little girl’s endeavour to cope with her sadism towards her parents. Jones enumerates ways in which the fantasy of possessing a penis attempts to allay this sadism and accompanying anxiety, developing as he does in Kleinian fashion the concept of a good and bad penis. Behind penis envy, Jones argues, against Freud, is a complex network of fantasies whose aim is essentially defensive. This is in keeping with the view of an innate femininity which presupposes the existence of a primary penis envy consisting in an innate desire to have a child, a desire expressed by the wish to incorporate the penis into the leading erogenous zone.