closer to their fathers. Girls were seen as developing a physical sense of inferiority, due to their initial representation of the male penis, as acquired through peer games or otherwise. For Freud, girls were attracted to their fathers in search for a penis, that would make them similar to them. And only when they realized that they were not going to be males, they would ‘accept the second best option’, that of femininity . Girls would then feel heterosexual desire and hope to be ‘their fathers´ little girls’. However, towards the end of his life, Freud recognized that female sexuality remained as much a mystery to him as to any other man. And he encouraged female analysts to develop his ideas further. During the suffrage movement of the 1920s, a first debate on female sexuality took place within the psychoanalytic movement. One of the most important opponents of Freud was Karen Horney (1924). She accused him of being biased towards men and of creating a theory that devalued women. One of her main assumptions was that each sex had something unique that provoked envy in the opposite sex. Womb envy was seen as more significant and pervasive than penis envy. Men attempted to come to terms with their secondary role in procreation and, unconsciously compensated for it, developing womb envy. Horney also argued that women were born with an innate tendency towards heterosexuality. She disagreed with two aspects of Freudian theory: a) that girls had no knowledge of their vagina, and; b) that they necessarily had to go through a phallic masculine developmental phase. She considered that girls did not feel castrated. Horney regarded penis envy as a transitory process, of limited importance, to which girls would only regress if they did not recognize their own sexual desire. Her theories were supported by other influential psychoanalysts like, Ernest Jones (1927; 1935), Melanie Klein (1928;1957) and Wilhelm Reich (1942; 1949) himself. Penis´ castration, according to Klein, was not the main root of girls´ deeper anxieties. These were caused by their fantasies and/or experiences of potential damage to the insides of their bodies, to their female organs. Mothers could eventually inflict such wounds, in revenge for their daughters´ envy of the maternal body, principally of the breasts. They could thus be capable of destroying their daughters´ capacity to bear children in the future. As a pioneer of Object Relations Theory, she substantively influenced the development of a ‘Mother-Centred Psychoanalysis’. British Object Relations authors and American Ego Psychologists have pursued further these early theoretical developments. Women have been portrayed as having enormous emotional power, based on: the reproduction of the human species and children´ s encompassing maternal dependency during early life. Women are seen as having greater impact on children´ s psychic life than men, in spite of the prevalent stronger male economic and political power. However, women´ s dominant emotional role during childhood should also be attributed to an engendered social division of labour, i.e. as it originates from the way gender is socially structured. Cultural patriarchy largely accounts for the role assigned to females as ‘main gatekeepers’ of children ´s upbringing. This includes: a) an overall secondary social role for women in ‘rational and efficient’ societies; b) social and cultural gender constructs that denigrate the ‘feminine’ (feeling, emotions, internal life) and, in so doing, hinder the development of healthy female and masculine attributes for both genders. Reich, in a number of ways, supported Karen Horney´ s theoretical reframing. But his theory also represented a leap forward. He showed that society repressed not only genital (4), but also pre-genital sexuality, leaving adults vulnerable to genital sexual insatisfaction and /or to regression to forms of pre-genital sexuality. In the “Function of Orgasm”(1942 ), he showed that no orgasm could be considered complete, unless all the body participated through voluntary and involuntary movements. Reich defined healthy female roles in revolutionary terms for his time. And these permeated his social work and psychological thinking, though he did not particularly discuss female sexuality in itself. In his Sex-Pol writings (1935) and his social hygiene clinics, he defended equality between the sexes and the economic independence of women, their right to sexual satisfaction, enduring love relationships and natural versus compulsory families. He strongly believed that women had to develop their own careers, in order to sever the link between love and economic necessity. Already at the end of the 1920’s, he discussed a variety of patriarchal attitudes that women had to endure: double sexual standards, the notion that women were naturally sexually passive, tolerance of male infidelity and education towards male supremacy with female connivance. His position on divorced parents’ childrearing practices was, however, somewhat contradictory: at times, supporting State participation in childrearing; at other, that of community organizations. From Reich´ s therapeutic work, there are a number of lessons to draw for gender change: a) receptive traits were given equal value to active ones, in the development of orgasmic potency; b) harmony between both these sides in an individual, was considered a precondition for the sexual satisfaction of both women and men; c) cultural gender inequalities had to be radically transformed for individuals to obtain and maintain pleasure energy & character vol.37 may 2009 49
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