Penis envy From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation search For the Crass album see Penis Envy album For the Virgin 1 documentary see Envy Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorized reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis Freud considered this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women According to Freud the parallel reaction in boys to the realization that girls do not have a penis is castration anxiety In contemporary culture the term is sometimes used symbolically or metaphorically to refer to the idea that women wish they had a penis or to refer to anxieties between men about the size of their genitals Contents hide 1 Freud s Theory o 1 1 Criticisms of Freud s theory 1 1 1 Within psychoanalytic circles 1 1 2 Feminist criticisms 2 Male penis envy 3 See also 4 References 5 External links edit Freud s Theory Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of a little girl s interest in and envy of the penis in his 1908 article On the Sexual Theories of Children but did not fully develop the idea until substantially later in 1914 when his work On Narcissism was published It was not mentioned in the first edition of Freud s earlier Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex 1905 The term came to significance as Freud gradually refined his views of female sexuality coming to describe a mental process he believed occurred in girls as they passed through the Electra complex from the phallic stage to the latency stage see Psychosexual development In Freud s psychosexual development theory the phallic stage approximately between the ages of 3 5 and 6 is the first period of development in which the libidinal focus is primarily on the genital area Prior to this stage the libido broadly defined by Freud as the primary motivating energy force within the mind focuses on other physiological areas For instance in the oral stage in the first 12 to 18 months of life libidinal needs concentrate on the desire to eat sleep suck and bite The theory suggests that the penis becomes the organ of principal interest to both sexes in the phallic stage This becomes the catalyst for a series of pivotal events in psychosexual development These events known as the Oedipus complex for boys and the Electra complex for girls result in significantly different outcomes for each gender because of differences in anatomy For girls Soon after the libidinal shift to the penis the child develops her first sexual impulses towards her mother The girl realizes that she is not physically equipped to have a heterosexual relationship with her mother since she does not have a penis She desires a penis and the power that it represents This is described as penis envy She sees the solution as obtaining her father s penis She develops a sexual desire for her father The girl blames her mother for her apparent castration what she sees as punishment by the mother for being attracted to the father assisting a shift in the focus of her sexual impulses from her mother to her father Sexual desire for her father leads to the desire to replace and eliminate her mother The girl identifies with her mother so that she might learn to mimic her and thus replace her The child anticipates that both aforementioned desires will incur punishment by the principle of lex talionis The girl employs the defence mechanism of displacement to shift the object of her sexual desires from her father to men in general The offshoot of these events often cited in the media and colloquially is that a girl really wants to become her mother so that she can control her father A similar process occurs in boys of the same age as they pass through the phallic stage of development The key differences being that the focus of sexual impulses need not switch from mother to father and that the fear of castration castration anxiety remains The boy desires his mother and identifies with his father whom he sees as having the object of his sexual impulses Furthermore the boy s father being the powerful aggressor of the family unit is sufficiently menacing that the boy employs the defense mechanism of displacement to shift the object of his sexual desires from his mother to women in general Freud thought this series of events occurred prior to the development of a wider sense of sexual identity and was required for an individual to continue to enter into his or her gen