Why do we call the encounters with sex difference, which everyone
acknowledges occur before “castration anxiety,” the
“pre-Oedipal” stage? Even granting that there is a
child–parent competition for the opposite sexed parent's
affection (a claim rejected by object relations theories, in which boys
and girls both resent the father), how do we make sense of a developmental
model in which the first stage (pre-Oedipal) is named as a function of
what happens next? Ruth Brunswick, who consulted with Sigmund Freud on the
subject, writes that Freud personally coined the term
“pre-Oedipal” in 1931 (Brunswick
1940, 293). Having authored the “Oedipal complex,”
Freud himself is committed to characterizing prior developments as
pre-Oedipal. Does this make sense? Should this convention be upheld? Given
that conventional understandings of the Oedipal complex underlie
culturally specific understandings of masculinity, these conventions
ultimately have political consequences.
Why do not the experiences and questions about sex difference between
18 months and two years—the “pregnancy complex” (Freud [1909a] 1955, 10: 83)1
—give rise instead to a “post-pregnancy
complex”? Why are all popular theories of childhood sexual
development, including those of feminist object relations theorists,
expressed with respect to the power of the father? Why was Jacques Lacan
one of the few scholars who listened to “Mrs. Macalpine,” even
as he attempted to undermine her views?
Despite their authors' best intentions, most feminist and queer
psychoanalytic theory actually reinvigorates the patriarchal Oedipal
family romance and its imbricated structures of male dominance. Texts
written by and with reference to authors as different as Nancy Chodorow
and Judith Butler remain captive to Freud's misleading master
narrative of the penis. In the case of feminist object relations theory,
the putatively asexual pre-Oedipal stage never overcomes its implied
teleology: As pre-Oedipal, these children are ready-made actors
for the ensuing Oedipal drama of penis-centric desire (Benjamin 1988; Chodorow 1978, 1989; Dinnerstein 1976).2
And for
traditional and feminist Lacanians, the opaque but tasteful signifier of
the literary phallus
elides a signified
referent, the result being the most grandiose absent presence one cannot
imagine, as the thing remains quietly there, as plain and unnoticed as the
nose on one's face. The breast of object relations theory and the
absent penis of feminist and queer theory overwhelm the scholarly
landscape on sex development and performativity, distracting writers from
the psychodynamics of birth at the foundation of kinship structures that
produce our sexed subjectivities.
The problem with the prevailing feminist psychoanalytic literatures is
not that feminists unconsciously rely on an anatomically sexed body.5
The problem is that
their textual bodies are decoys, the accentuated breast or
penis/phallus distracting from the psychoanatomy of the uterus. The
plastic human—who in object relations theory has a breast that can
be turned into a bottle and paternal care, and in feminist Lacanian theory
a floating phallus/penis—is a poor metonymic mannequin for
understanding present political kinship structures and for inspiring their
supersession. Those who draw on D. W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan do not
realize that these texts are the unacknowledged supplements to the
foundational matrices produced by womb-centric psychoanalytic writers in
the 1920s through 1950s, especially Lacan's nemeses Dr. Ida Macalpine
and her son Richard Hunter. These matricentric writings on pregnancy envy
describe young boys who see the penis as pointing to their inability to
give birth, so that this organ is valued in a compensatory and anxious
fashion. Acknowledging the desire for a baby among small boys sheds light
on the
character of the father and his law, both of
which are overblown by feminist and other Lacanian investigations, to wit,
the conventional capitalization of Father and Law—a typographical
honor bestowed because the father without uppercase garlands raises
questions about the source of his enormous power that leave the
father's defenders and critics alike confused and nervous. The
matricentric psychoanalytic literature invites a neofoundational approach
to sex development that emanates from the vast literature on pregnancy
envy. Too long ignored, this literature offers us an alternative way to
theorize the sex/gender/sexuality system, one not embedded in the
Oedipal complex.
BIRTH AND IDENTITY
Pregnancy envy has profound political consequences, the most
significant being the creation of kinship rules, meaning the law of the
father, as the universal function of kinship rules is to put men into
relationships with children. Hence, fatherhood follows from men's
legal relation to the mother, not men's possible genetic ties to
progeny. This continues to be the general law even in societies that have
paternity tests, including the United States, such that law enables a
compensatory reproductive power denied by men's inability to give
birth (Stevens 1999, 2005). Although each of us is born from a woman, half
of us are told that we are boys, and hence we will not be able to
reproduce this feat. As adults, men sublimate the trauma of their
childhood realization of this difference through kinship rituals and laws.
Understanding that the inability to give birth is a psychic hurdle for
boys alone7
Of course, many women cannot or
do not give birth, but girls as a class are not told they will never give
birth. Boys as a class are told that instead of being able to give birth,
they have a penis.
allows us to address the question of why and
how it is that intergenerational groups—of family, nationality,
ethnicity, and race—are so important to the constitution of
one's form of being, as well as to the constitution of sex roles. The
psychic investments in constituting these affiliations as essential and
natural (from the Latin
nasci, meaning birth) are the answer to
the question, “What can those without wombs do to compensate for our
inability to give birth?” Kinship rules establish membership in
these intergenerational groups. Insofar as kinship rules figure men,
specifically fathers, as dominant—even in matrilineal societies, and
even in so-called liberal states providing apparent juridical equality
between husbands and wives—these practices invite examination of the
particular investments in controlling birth that men seem to have.
8 Benjamin points out that those men who
especially “idealize motherhood are those who most loudly defend the
virtues of the paternal familial order” (1995, 107).
Commenting on one such
compensatory practice, the couvade (where husbands pretend they have given
birth), Bruno Bettelheim writes: “Such an apeing of superficials
only emphasizes the more how much the real, essential powers are envied.
Women, emotionally satisfied by having given birth and secure in their
ability to produce life, can agree to the couvade; men need it to fill the
emotional vacuum created by their inability to bear children” (
Bettelheim 1962, 111).
Bettelheim's metastudies of work by B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen
(1899), Theodore Reik (1931), M. F. Montagu (1946),
Bronislaw Malinowski (1948), Margaret Mead
(1949), and many others documenting pregnancy
envy in preliterate societies still resonate, as women still accede to
marriage rules that create and ritualize the law of the father, giving
husbands prerogatives by law that biology denies them (Herdt 1981; Lévi-Strauss
1969; Rubin 1975). The power of life and
death mothers have through biology was appropriated by men, creating a
class of “husbands” who for much of recorded history had the
power to kill or enslave their wives' children.9
“A father shall have the right of life and death over
his son born in lawful marriage” in Table Four, Law One, from the
Roman “Twelves Tables” (c. 450 b.c.), translated and
quoted by Samuel Scott, The Civil Law (17 volumes), 1932
(copyright expired). Online at
http://www.constitution.org/sps/sps01.htm (April 17,
2005).
Bettelheim would explain that these laws of
ressentiment occur because of men's reflexive efforts to
compensate for the ontological superiority of mothers over fathers, the
premise being that giving birth is in itself more powerful than anything
fathers can do.
Of course, giving birth is just one contribution to childhood
development. Adults may contribute to the sustenance of young dependents
in many other crucial ways. When infant and even toddler boys, however,
first encounter information about their lack, they cannot easily grasp
alternative avenues for acquiring power similar to that which, they
realize, resulted in their own birth. This leaves boys frustrated. Rather
than pregnancy envy resulting from an inherent superiority of female
reproductive organs over those of males, as Bettelheim suggests, it seems
that the sexed compensatory dynamics of kinship laws stem from boys'
fantasies of maternal omnipotence. Boys' overinvestments in these
fantasies of maternal omnipotence and the failure to address
these fantasies by a socially recognized naming of them appear to underlie
widespread, cross-cultural compensatory laws and rituals of
masculinity.
COMPENSATORY MASCULINITIES: A CRITICAL
HISTORY
This section argues that the male subject is distinguished from the
female subject by a set of attitudes and behaviors compensatory to
“his” inability to give birth. This argument is developed
through a schematic critical history of well-known observations about
sexuality, sex, and gender in psychoanalytic theory. Sex is understood to
mean different subject positions located in relation to the mother, as she
and other kinship roles are interpellated through legal, behavioral, and
linguistic practices and institutions. This is a formal observation about
the structures of sexed dichotomies in contrast to other dichotomized or
pluralized forms of being: We do not need anatomy per se, but we do need
some clear criteria to distinguish sexed subjectivities from other ones,
so that a habit of dress or manner of speech is recognizably butch or
femme (sexed) and not northern and southern Californian (regional), for
instance. That these sexed dichotomies are structured in relationship to
the biological event of pregnancy does not imply that those born with
uteruses must behave one way and those born without uteruses must behave
another way, nor does it speak to the content of sexed behaviors or,
say, butch or femme subject positions. In psychic terms, we might say that
kinship rules comprise a power grid built by anxious males to organize the
distribution of erotic energies.10
The
various enactments of sex difference, e.g., Butler's “gender
trouble” (1990a) or Judith
Halberstam's “female masculinities” (1998) only require an erotically charged site of
phenomenological sex roles. Sexed and sexualized forms of being, or more
phenomenologically temporary performances, are built—often
metonymically and in delightfully varied and subtle permutations—on
the foundation of kinship systems.
What follows is a sketch of
some dominant paradigms of sex development, with critiques from the
vantage point of pregnancy envy theory.
11 For a clear summary of differences between drive theory and
object relations theory, see Chodorow (1986).
Freud
In his essay, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction between the Sexes,” Freud offers two explanations for
why both boys and girls come to value the penis (Freud
[1925] 1955).12
Citations
to Freud in the text refer to the date of first publication. Quotations
are all from the Standard Edition (Freud
1955), except for the Freud texts from which Macalpine and Hunter
quote.
First, “the penis … owes its extraordinarily
high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation
of the species” (
Freud 1925] 1955,
21: 256). This is thought to occur at the level of the unconscious.
Sperm's importance is tacitly, universally known, according to Freud.
Second, Freud thinks girls value the penis because it is bigger than their
genitalia. Girls “notice the penis of a brother or playmate,
strikingly visible and of larger proportions, at once recognize it as the
superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from
that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis” (
ibid., 21: 252). Freud extrapolates from this to
conclude that boys also value their penises for reasons of size,
apparently as a narcissistic attachment to the view of themselves held by
girls (
ibid.).
The penis also points to the father, with his “superior
organ” that triggers sexual development and identity (ibid.). In addition to the supremacy of the penis in
itself, the father's—penis possessor's—role as the
family's protector imbues the penis with its sacred character. In
explaining the “oceanic feeling” underlying religious
experiences, Freud writes, “I cannot think of any need in childhood
as strong as the need for a father's protection…. The origin
of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as
the feeling of infantile helplessness (Freud
[1930] 1955, 21: 72). The possibility of an omnipotent
protector being female is categorically ruled out: “The common man
cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an
enormously exalted father” (ibid., 21:
74).13
Freud's conviction on this point
seems odd, in light of his earlier acknowledgment of the “great
mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have preceded the
father-gods” ([1913] 1955, 13:
149). Bettelheim discusses this (1962, 42, 45,
61, and esp. 158).
So far we have two factors explaining the
power of the penis and its symbols: first, the potency of the penis itself
(because it reproduces the species and is big); and second, the authority
of the father over the family. These are the
preconditions for
the boy's Oedipal complex, according to Freud, and there is a sense
of sex identity that occurs at ages two to three. Yet not until the
“girl gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish
for a child:
and with this purpose in view … takes her
father as a love-object” do we see the sexed drives Freud locates in
the Elektra complex (
Freud [1925]
1955, 19: 256, emphasis in original).
The boy's entrance into the Oedipus complex, Freud writes, also
occurs between the ages of three and six, when the “little
boy” expresses his sexual desire for his mother (Freud [1915–1917] 1955,
16: 329, 333). In contrast with the earlier “object love” of
her as caretaker, found in boys and girls, boys at the Oedipal stage
compete with their fathers for the sexual love of the mother. Freud
emphasizes the sexual as opposed to diffuse egoistical regard for the
mother, arguing that if the attraction were the former, the boy would
attempt to engage the father in a similar fashion, “since it would
be merely foolish if he did not tolerate two people in his service rather
than only one of them” (ibid.). Freud
dates the Oedipal stage considerably later than Melanie Klein (1985), who says it begins when the child is one year
old, and than Lacan (1977b), who believes that
it occurs at 18 months. Freud says that castration anxiety at this stage
is a result of the boy's projected fear of the father's
eliminating the boy as a competitor for the mother's affections by
castrating the boy. Hence, the penis is valued as instrumental to the
possession of a mother-surrogate, what the boy accomplishes when he grows
up and has a woman of his own.
This account raises more questions than it answers. If the
penis's exalted function in reproduction (not its size) makes its way
into our unconscious, then why not also the woman's eggs and uterus?
And what is so intrinsically desirable about having an external organ that
can become erect at inappropriate moments, that may not be erect and lead
to other embarrassing moments, and that is extremely vulnerable to
injury?14
These observations lead
psychologist Carla Golden to refer to “penis pity” as a
logical fantasy supplement to “penis envy” (in a lecture,
Smith College, 1983).
These equally empirical features of the
penis are as biologically determined as the relative size of genitalia,
but Freud omits their mention. His hypotheses, however, are quite
valuable. They signal awareness that if “castration anxiety”
is to have meaning, then one must explain the importance of the penis. Why
would the boy care more about losing his penis than, say, his right arm,
especially when Freud elsewhere (
[1905]
1955) states that children do not grasp the role of penises in
reproduction? Asking this question rather explicitly is a different tack
than that pursued by Lacan and others, including feminists, who deny any
determinate relation between anatomy and sex. These more ambiguous writers
end up with the tautology Freud tried to escape: Boys fear losing the
phallus (a symbolic entry to the gift economy and law of the father)
because without it they will have no phallus.
Feminist Object Relations Theory
Perhaps one of the most important early feminist challenges to
Freud's Oedipal complex is Philip Slater's “Hera
complex,” a masculinity defensively reacting to narcissistic,
punishing mothers. Slater's avowedly causal (but ultimately circular)
explanation of men's self-aggrandizing behaviors in ancient Greece
and the contemporary West is that deprived of the company of her husband,
the mother treats her son as a surrogate husband—making demands of
him that she would like to make of her husband, and punishing him the way
she would like to punish her husband. In response to this behavior, boys
grow up fearing and consequently disdaining women.15
Slater focuses on ancient Greece, but he makes a point of
arguing for the broader relevance of his observations.
Institutionalized misogyny is born of boys seeing themselves as weak,
according to Slater. This results in overbearing husbands and leads to
resentful mothering practices that reinvigorate boys' anxiety about
women. These sons, as the next generation's husbands, have no
interest in spending time with their wives and families, and so the
pattern continues.
As opposed to D. W. Winnicott's classic object relations theory
(Winnicott 1953) locating the breast as the
primary site of children's fantasies, Slater reintroduces the notion,
appearing in Freud's earlier work, that the uterus is the
central source of boys' preoccupation with maternal power and sex
differences. Pointing to metaphors of the womb as a source of death (a
tomb) (Slater 1968, 78) and an agent that may
swallow a child (pp. 51, 64, 89), Slater argues that boys develop their
sexual identities in reaction to anxieties about being destroyed or
consumed by their mothers.16
Slater does not
speak to the quite reasonable proposition that girls might have similar
fantasies and that this might affect their psychic development as well.
Instead, he states that mothers actually treat(ed) their sons badly, and
says this explains why men hate(d) women. He thereby accords the status of
observed events to what may be infant fantasies.
Boys react to
these fears by attempting to separate themselves from their mothers, as
well as from any remnants of femininity in their own identity (rooted in
an initial experience of identification with the mother). This results in
a “sexuality … fundamentally concerned with the dissolution
and rearrangement of boundaries” (p. 102). In this regard, Slater
quotes Jane Harrison: “‘Manhood, among primitive peoples,
seems to be envisaged as ceasing to be a woman’” (
1968, 102, quoting
Harrison
1962, 506–7). The male's devaluation of his mother and,
by extension, women results in a sex-segregated society that reproduces
these child-rearing pathologies (
Slater 1968,
416, citing
Whiting 1965, 123–37).
In The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Nancy Chodorow, a student of Slater, offers a
story that appears vaguely similar to his in its broad outline, but is
fundamentally at odds with it (1978).17
Laura Green suggests that in
Mothering, Chodorow's account of boys' gender
development sticks much more closely to the traditional Freudian one than
does her description of girls' gender identity (personal
communication, 1990).
Both argue that boys react to their
dependence on, and subsequent separation from, their mothers by becoming
vigilant about establishing and maintaining personal boundaries. Slater
argues that boys' difference from their mothers prompts feelings of
otherness and, hence, heightened separation, whereas Chodorow, following
Freud, believes that this sexual difference, in reproducing the adult
heterosexual dyad, makes the mother/son relation “more
intense” (
Chodorow 1978, 130).
For Slater, the sexual difference between the mother and the son
reminds the mother of her absent husband—whom she resents. For
Chodorow, the sexual difference between the mother and the son reminds the
mother (and the son) of adult sexual intimacy that must be repressed. The
two versions, however, both claim to challenge the centrality of the penis
as dispositive of one's sense of self, either positively or
defensively.
Chodorow appears eager to recast the Oedipal story from one about the
penis per se to one in which gender identity evolves through changing
relations between the infant and parents. Specifically, awareness of a
sexual relation between males and females, not the valuation of the penis
in itself, determines the mother/son relation. Chodorow reverses
Freud's version of the causal relation between the penis and the
sexual tension in the family. Freud states that the penis causes anxieties
about sex. Chodorow maintains that boys' anxiety about
gender—rooted in their mothers' anxieties—is responsible
for boys' ideas about the penis (Chodorow
1978, 98, 193, 108, and passim). She goes to some lengths to
emphasize that a girl's attraction to her father may occur because
his separateness from her represents the possibility of freedom from her
mother and is not necessarily caused by drives rooted in sexual difference
(1978, 121). Chodorow suggests that there is
nothing special about the penis, other than the fact that it belongs to
the person in the family who is not around very much, but she later states
that paternal absence is nonetheless destined by anatomy, as it is the
“genitally toned relationship” that “draws the son into
triangular conflicts” (1978, 110; see also
1989, 49).
Genital difference is at the heart of the mother/son relationship.
Chodorow herself seems to recognize a problem in this:
I must admit to fudging here about the contributory effect in
all of this of a mother's sexual orientation—whether she is
heterosexual or lesbian. Given a female gender identity, she is “the
same as” her daughter and “different from” her son, but
part of what I am talking about also presumes a different kind of cathexis
of daughter and son deriving from heterosexuality. (1978, 110, emphasis added)
Chodorow repeats this analysis as well later (1989, 53, 71, 73). If the effects of gender are
informed by sexual orientation, indeed, if gender itself occurs in the
crucible of an innate sexual orientation (not the ideology of a
“society like ours”) (1978, 108),
then this “fudging” warrants far more than a footnote's
worth of acknowledgment. At bottom, Chodorow's story about gender
(1978, 1989), at least
for boys, is largely the same as Freud's, since Chodorow believes
that the ultimate causal forces in determining the gendered nature of the
experience of the mother are heterosexual drives rooted in anatomical
difference.18
In explaining why sexuality is
a function of socialization, not biology, Chodorow refers to the
socializing functions of incest taboos. Contrary to the antibiologism she
propounds elsewhere, she claims here that the incest taboo is rooted in
innate drives to develop new families (1978, 132). Even Freud understood that the principal
lesson taught by the Oedipal drama was the social character of the incest
taboo and the absence of any innate aversion to sex within a gens: The
“findings of psycho-analysis make the hypothesis of an innate
aversion to incestuous intercourse totally untenable” (Freud [1913] 1955, 13: 123). In accounting
for why the taboo exists, Freud rules out biological explanations and
concludes, “We are ignorant of the cause of the horror of incest and
cannot tell in what direction to look for it” (ibid., 125). See also Lévi-Strauss (1969). For more on Freud himself questioning
heterosexuality's innateness, see Flax (1990, 57, n. 22).
Ida Macalpine
“Mrs. Macalpine” (a British M.D.) appears prominently in
Lacan's “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis” (Lacan 1977c). His article is a
rebuttal to Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter's critique of
Freud's reading of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoir of My
Nervous Illness (Macalpine and Hunter 1955,
2).19
Although many others (see n. 23) have
figured the Oedipal complex as a compensatory psychic struggle for
masculinity, I focus on the Macalpine and Hunter texts because of their
historiography of the Schreber case and their own sociology of knowledge
on its reception. In their introductory and concluding essays to this text
(Schreber [1903] 1955), and in a
separate work in which they introduce their translation of the Austrian
archive's manuscript (Macalpine and Hunter
1956) on which Freud based his “A Seventeenth Century
Demonological Neurosis” (Freud [1923]
1955), they sustain a critique of a key Freudian text, a
contribution that still has not been satisfactorily addressed as a
legitimate minority perspective in the feminist psychoanalytic
literature.
In his “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an
Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides)” (
Freud [1911]
1955), Freud first works out his theory of psychoses. Drawing on
the memoir of a mental patient, Freud forcefully argues that repressed
homosexual desire is at the root of Schreber's and many other
patients' disturbances. Schreber was the perfect Freudian case study.
A well-educated German official who held the position of president of the
Court of Appeals in Dresden in the late nineteenth century, Schreber
documented his erudite fantasies in great detail. He was clearly
psychotic, and had been institutionalized on three occasions for a total
of at least nine years. He was also an articulate observer of his
symptoms, often expressing what he referred to as his “nervous
illness” in mythical dimensions, as he described various agents of
God attempting to impregnate him for the purpose of reproducing future
generations of Schrebers, and indeed, the human race. In doing so, he
often drew on the same ancient myths and literary classics that Freud
used.
Freud believed that Schreber's anxiety over his homosexual
desires resulted in castration anxiety of such magnitude that it
precipitated a radical withdrawal from reality. According to British
psychiatrists Macalpine and Hunter, who translated and republished
Schreber's Memoirs in English in 1955:
[B]y psychoanalysts, Freud's thesis was
immediately and generally accepted as forming the basis of
‘paranoia’. Thenceforth paranoid symptom formation was
considered as explained by conflict over unconscious homosexuality. (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 10)
They then quote several psychoanalysts who root modern ideas about
psychosis in Freud's discussion of the Schreber case (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 10–11). I reproduce
the Macalpine and Hunter text rather extensively to document just how much
of this cogent, radical critique of Freud's Oedipal complex was again
ignored or forgotten, an intellectual historical phenomenon significant in
itself. That an argument that appeared in a widely read, well-respected
journal of psychoanalytic theory, as well as in an important book of Freud
studies, has been almost entirely excluded from the field of
psychoanalytic inquiry suggests repression of no small dimensions.
Aware that only a handful of psychoanalysts had actually read
Schreber's Memoirs, Macalpine and Hunter were troubled that
Freud's rendition of Schreber's symptoms had such widespread
acceptance. The Memoirs were published in 1903 and were largely
out of circulation by the time Freud's essay appeared, as most
remaining copies had been bought by Schreber's family upon his death
in 1910 (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 2). In
addition, the English translations of many passages used in Freud's
essay appear in “‘such a manner that not only is their meaning
lost, but sometimes actually reversed’” (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 369, quoting Niederland 1951, 579). In 1953, Macalpine and Hunter
published an article in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and thereby
launched the first full-scale attack on Freud's reading of the
Memoirs. So that readers could evaluate Freud's
interpretations of Schreber's Memoirs for themselves, two
years later Macalpine and Hunter published the Memoirs, which
they translated into English, edited, and introduced. The Schreber volume
was not republished in German until 1973 (Schreber
[1903] 1973). Macalpine and Hunter's remains the
standard English translation of the Memoirs, having been reissued
in 1988 with a contentious introduction by Samuel M. Weber (Weber 1988). This edition is now also out of print.
The most recent publication of the Memoirs uses the Macalpine and
Hunter translation but omits their framing essays (Schreber [1903] 2000).
The following passages are Macalpine and Hunter's selections and
paraphrases from Freud explaining that Schreber's psychosis grew out
of his desire for and fear of being penetrated by his psychiatrist, Dr.
Flechsig:20
For purposes of clarity in this
passage, only Freud's statements are in italics with sentences
identified by F numbers, Schreber's in bold, and Macalpine and
Hunter's in regular typeface.
‘[Schreber had] a feminine (that is,
passive homosexual) wish-fantasy, which took as its object the figure of
his physician … (F.431). The feminine fantasy, which
aroused such violent opposition in the patient, thus had its root in a
longing, intensified to an erotic pitch, for his father and brother
(F.435). Thus in the case of Schreber we find ourselves once again
upon the familiar ground of the father-complex (F.440)….
The person he longed for now became his persecutor, and the content of
his wish-fantasy became the content of his persecution’
(F.431–2), because it implied degradation and castration: hence
‘it was impossible for Schreber to become reconciled to playing
the part of a female prostitute towards his physician (F.432). He
took up a feminine attitude towards God; he felt that he was God's
wife’ (F.413)…. ‘A new race of men, born from
the spirit of Schreber’, would, so he thought, revere as their
ancestor this man who believed himself the victim of persecution (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 372–73, quoting Freud
([1911] 1955), quoting Schreber
[1903]).
In sum, Freud believed that Schreber's psychoses was due to
unresolved anxieties precipitated by homosexual fantasies in which he was
God's wife, although Schreber also claims at times to be God's
whore.
Macalpine and Hunter take issue with Freud's analysis, suggesting
that his preoccupation with inserting Schreber into paradigms of the
Oedipal complex—such as Schreber's “father complex”
or “castration anxiety”—precluded Freud from seeing the
true source of Schreber's homosexual fantasies: procreation
fantasies. Macalpine and Hunter write: “When Freud assumed the
sun to be a father symbol and God equivalent to an earthly father, he
failed to see that Schreber was preoccupied with the origin and giving of
life” (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 377).
They argue that Schreber's fantasies about being impregnated by his
physician, Flechsig, were instrumental to his fantasy of being
able to give birth. Schreber believed that to be able to give birth he
would have to be penetrated by a man. His procreation fantasies underlay
his homosexual fantasies, and not vice versa (Macalpine
and Hunter 1955, 382). Freud's emphasis on the sex act allows
him to fix the penis as the linchpin in pathological and, therefore,
normal constructions of masculinity. A reading that grasps the
significance of Schreber's anxiety about pregnancy would privilege
the capacity to give birth and not overestimate the contribution of the
Oedipal complex to his psychic longings and anxieties.
In offering this pointed, political criticism of Freud and Freud
studies, Macalpine and Hunter realize that theirs is a
counternarrative:
It is surprising that so little interest has been shown in
pregnancy fantasies as Freud held that the child assumes first that
everybody is like itself, and that when it discovers this is not so, it
wishes to have what it has not got. Thus the girl's penis envy fills
psychoanalytic literature to overflow, while the boy's envy of
child-bearing receives almost no attention. (1955, 381)
Making up for the systematic avoidance of the topic, Macalpine and
Hunter offer their readers a section titled “Literature on Pregnancy
Fantasies”:
Glover (1946) notes,
“… although less attention is paid to the fact, it is
undeniable that the boy's unconscious disappointment at being unable
to emulate his mother's feat of baby-production is as deep as the
corresponding jealousy of the girl that she does not possess male
organs….” Jones (1942) finds
“mutual envy between the sexes is common in early childhood….
[T]he male one, envy of the female capacity to give birth to
children, is less recognized than its counterpart” (1955, 351–82).21
The authors also quote from Freud ([1908] 1955, 9; [1909a] 1955, 10; [1923] 1955, 19). Macalpine and
Hunter's passing comment about the “confusion between neurosis
and psychosis” refers to their belief that pregnancy fantasies are
not only the cause of psychoses but the root of garden variety neuroses as
well.
In the passages Macalpine and Hunter quote, procreation is described
as so central to children's understandings about who people are and
what they do that very young children cannot imagine someone unable to
give birth, and hence develop accounts in which boys also grow up into
mothers. Their argument is as compelling for what it says about
Freud's mistakes as it is for the virtual vacuum into which their
criticisms disappeared.22
Exceptions to this
general trend are Kittay (1983, 1995) and Sprengnether (1990). Although Ettinger specifically challenges the
centrality of the “Phallus” as opposed to the
“Matrix” (her motive for capitalization is unclear), she
devotes just two sentences to pregnancy envy (1992, 203). For important earlier studies of pregnancy
envy and compensatory masculinities not cited elsewhere, see Boehm (1930); Eisler (1921); Evans
(1951); Jacobson (1950); Lample de Groot (1946); Reik (1931); Van Der
Leeuw (1958); and Van Leeuwen (1966).
They maintain, on the authority of an
array of reputable psychoanalytic theorists, that Freud had stated just
about everything important about Schreber's psychoses backwards. Yet
in today's psychoanalytic literature, Freud's Oedipal
foundations and the Lacanian readings that stand on them seem not only
unscathed but almost eerily untouched.
What happens when boys learn they cannot give birth? Should we assume,
with Freud, that they simply forget about earlier fantasies, their
identification with their mother assuming the relation to subsequent
development that Freud claimed the matrilineal Mynoan-Mycenean
civilization bore to Athenian civilization—that is, no relation at
all (Freud [1931] 1955, 21: 226)?23
Freud states that the early relation of girls
to their mothers undergoes a thorough rupture during the Oedipal stage, as
did ancient Greece, supposedly, in exhibiting no continuities with more
archaic civilizations. The break, Freud says here, is even more intense
for boys. Abel's (1989) reading of Freud
also discusses this.
Macalpine and Hunter offer an alternative
hypothesis. As opposed to Freud and his followers, who argue that boys
first develop their sex identity on the basis of their fantasies about the
penis, Macalpine and Hunter suggest that boys' valorization of the
penis is one of compensation. Arguing in opposition to the traditional
Freudian formula, whereby babies are understood as substitutes for
penises, Macalpine and Hunter challenge the directionality of these
equivalences: The penis is understood as a substitute for being able to
have babies (
Schreber [1903] 1955,
383; and see
Brunswick 1940 and
Rogin 1989). Thus, fantasies about reproduction, and
not sexual desire, initially form the core of sex identity for boys.
One last point needs to be drawn from Macalpine and Hunter's
piece, one that is crucial for beginning to understand the precise
mechanism by which their argument has been displaced from the
psychoanalytic canon. According to Macalpine and Hunter, a major defect in
Freud's analysis of Schreber was that Freud overlooked
Schreber's hypochondriacal experiences, concentrating instead on his
written accounts:
Lack of understanding and confusion appear to hinge around
neglect of hypochondriacal symptoms, their mechanism and diagnostic
significance, in favour of the more dramatic, more easily understood, and
perhaps less disturbing psychic symptoms [Macalpine 1954]. It is noteworthy that all cases
of pregnancy fantasies quoted in the literature had somatic symptoms
predominantly; however, they are not accorded any significance and
are therefore scattered at random through the case histories. (Macalpine and Hunter 1955, 385, emphasis
added)
Freud selectively ignores information about the body's
textualization in the same ways as do the ancient Greek mythologies of
which Freudian psychoanalysis was wrought. A patrilineal society needs
Athena to be born from Zeus's head, and not boys from their mothers,
precisely because birth is so important.24
Margaret Homans argues that the tendency among Lacanians and
“other theorists of the French school” to treat any challenge
to the phallic imaginary as a naive humanism “derives from the
peculiarities of masculine psychosocial development,” and hence,
“we would be justified in arguing that to call Chodorow's
account only a myth would be once again to exclude the mother's
body” (Homans 1986, 15). Rank also
attributes the silence about “long and important periods of the
development of human culture [that] stood under the sway of the
so-called mother right” to “that primal repression which tries
to degrade and to deny woman both socially and intellectually on account
of her original connection with birth trauma” (Rank 1952, 36–37). So the very denial of birth
trauma (and envy) is associated with a repression of information
attributed to the body. See also Bettelheim (1962, 56–57).
Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious
Male (1962) lists dozens, if not hundreds,
of pregnancy-envy rituals across time and place. A sample includes teenage
boys in Chicago private schools whose blood initiation rites are timed to
correspond with their girlfriends' menstruation cycles (p. 28);
fathers in Africa feeding their blood to children as a means of supposedly
giving them life (p. 118); African men killing some boys in initiation
rites to “convince the women that all have been killed and that men
have brought some of them back to life,” the apparent resurrection
demonstrating men's ability to initiate life (p. 125); and African
anus plugging at the time of marriage: Husbands conceal their excretions,
hence simulating a state of constant pregnancy and fertility with the
mimicked symbolic cessation of menstruation (Bettelheim
1962, 128–29). Bettelheim ascribes this last practice to the
“desire of the men to demonstrate their legal right over their
progeny … by demonstration of the care they have exercised to
arouse fecundity and to arouse the accomplishment of the mother on the
occasion of giving birth” (p. 129) by a putatively parallel
fertility event. In an article about Italian husbands of pregnant women,
S. Masoni and colleagues write that the “couvade syndrome can be
considered to be the psychosomatic equivalent of primitive rituals of
initiation into paternity. Various symptoms have been described in of
bloating, morning sickness, diarrhea, and constipation that are higher for
husbands of pregnant wives than for husbands in control groups (Klein 1991; Wilson
1977).
The silence greeting the work on pregnancy envy from the 1920s through
the 1940s in the clinical literature, repeated in the 1950s with the
reception of the critical works by Macalpine and Hunter, is puzzling in
view of the many myths associated with images of an omnipotent
mother—archetypes of power associated with goddesses of fertility.
These potent ancient symbols have been explored deeply by anthropologists,
historians, and poets and yet have left little imprint on psychoanalysts
investigating sex development. Bettelheim himself attributes the silence
simply to male sexism (1962, 158), but this does
not explain why some men have discussed pregnancy envy, and it especially
does not account for the absence of any systematic use of pregnancy-envy
analytics among feminist writers on psychological development. D. W.
Winnicott and his feminist disciples Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow,
and Jessica Benjamin all put great stress on parental roles in infant
nurturing and offer little discussion of the fact that everyone is
born from a woman.
One reason to follow up on the work by Macalpine and Hunter and to
move away from theories centering the breast, the penis, or the phallus is
that except for the fact that everyone is born from a woman, all else
thought crucial to sex development is contingent: the type of
child-rearing structures in place (e.g., large networks, a nuclear family,
a single parent); parental sex and sexuality; family dynamics; whether the
child is breast-fed; how much time parents of each sex spend with a child;
whether the child has siblings, and then, whether they are older or
younger; or whether the parents is of the same or different sex. Some
object relations theorists acknowledge the problem that the contingencies
of parenting pose for a robust theory of sex development. For instance,
Dinnerstein defends generalization of her findings on the grounds that
even if a biological mother does not raise her children, some other woman
will (1976, 48). But this is not universally
true. Sometimes fathers are the primary caretakers. Feminist theorists are
caught between, on the one hand, a desire for plasticity in sex roles such
that the patrilineage and male domination might be overcome and, on the
other hand, a desire to explain the ubiquity of these systems until now.
For the most part, the desire for contingency has meant an almost willful
blindness to some important facts.
A few colleagues of Freud understood the importance of the
non-contingent role birth played in the consolidation of sex identity. For
instance, Otto Rank wrote: “This conception finds a strong heuristic
support in that it solves the riddle of the ubiquity of the
‘castration complex’ in a natural way by deriving it from the
indisputable universality of the act of birth” (Rank 1952, 20). The universality of one group's
inability to give birth is commensurate with the universality of kinship
rules and sex distinctions, a statement that cannot be made for the
assumptions of Freudian, Lacanian, or object relations theory. The
ubiquity of what Gayle Rubin later called the “sex/gender
system” (1975) is the same context Horney
references in her sketches of young boys' experiences of mothers,
along with the academic neglect of the masculine anxieties that follow
from this:
We are familiar with this envy [of motherhood] as
such, but it has hardly received due consideration as a dynamic factor.
When one begins, as I did, to analyze men only after a fairly long
experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression
of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and
motherhood… (Horney 1967,
60)
Even if Horney is overcommitted to a foundational story about the
importance of maternity and not an equally plausible account that
maternity imputes power to women via infant fantasies about the
significance of this activity, her point, reiterated by Macalpine and
Hunter, cries out for an extended intellectual engagement with these
accounts of pregnancy envy and sex development. Yet the likely place for a
telling of such a developmental story—feminist psychoanalytic
theory—does something else instead. Fearful of essentialist
inferences about sex roles that might follow from theorizing the uterus,
feminist psychoanalytic theorists emphasize the breast or the clitoris,
or, in the case of De Lauretis, the fetish (1994). The reasons differ, but the result is the same:
the penis remains enshrined as the object that bestows sex identity to
both boys and girls.25
Briefly, French
psychoanalytic theorists such as Luce Irigaray prefer to theorize the
clitoris and the vulva, rather than the uterus—out of fear of eliding
women's sexual desire (Irigaray 1985).
Kristeva (1986) figures the uterus as a lack that
marks women's ambiguous difference. And U.S.-American object relations
theorists Benjamin (1988), Chodorow (1978), and Dinnerstein (1976)
theorize the breast and historically contingent relations of
child-rearing—to allow for a possibility of changing gender development
patterns through shifting more parental responsibilities to fathers. By
appropriating themes from Freud and Lacan, Butler and De Lauretis have laid
the groundwork for a feminist lesbian phallus (Butler
1993; De Lauretis 1994, 189–190,
203–253, 263).
Pregnancy Envy and Rubin's Sex/Gender
System
Now that we have seen that a male lack may play a crucial role in the
experience of sex development, let us consider how this insight affects
predominant explanations of the sex/gender system, most notably, the
one developed so brilliantly and influentially by Gayle Rubin. It is one
thing to claim, as a matter of setting the record straight, that an aspect
of sex development has been overlooked, but to note this does not by
itself invite any specifically feminist engagement. Here I want to suggest
that as useful as Rubin's work has been for understanding the
dialectical structuring of sexuality and sex, it also gives rise to
certain confusions (about the penis) that attention to pregnancy envy
helps address. Rubin—writing before object relations theory had been
gendered femin -ine/-ist—stated that the sex/gender system
of the gift economy had its origins in the Oedipally constructed meanings
of the phallus.26
Rubin defines the
sex/gender system as the “set of arrangements by which a society
transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in
which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (1975, 159).
By inquiring into premodern business-as-usual practices that Marcel Mauss
and Claude Lévi-Strauss simply describe, Rubin denaturalizes the
exchange of women. Anatomy is not destiny, she says, but rather something
less pithy: a precondition for certain family configurations resulting in
men's need to maintain bonds among themselves through their exchange
of women.
According to Rubin, following Freud, the exchange of the mother for
the phallus appeases boys' fears of castration and is central to
their individuation from their mothers and consolidation of identity.27
Marilyn Strathern disagrees with the equation of
women with objects, drawing on Mauss's observation that gifts are not
mere objects but are imbued with a personality. So, Strathern (1984) reasons, women in the subject position of the gift
must also have a personality.
The gift economy, according to Rubin,
affirms the phallus as the source of autonomy and desire—circulating
women as an “expression of male dominance” (
1975, 192). The traffic in women is thus explained as a
wide-scale reenactment by men of their childhood exchange of mothers for a
masculine identity. The mutual affirmation of the phallus among men requires
their reciprocity in the exchange of women.
Why do women go along with this? Again following Freud, Rubin believes
that a similar valuation of the phallus occurs in the worldview of the
girl. Understanding the taboo against homosexuality and lacking the
phallus that can be exchanged for a woman, she withdraws from the mother
and turns to the father as the favored love-object, seeing him as the
vehicle for acquiring the phallus (Rubin 1975,
193–94). Thus, the girl only receives the phallus as “in
intercourse, or as a child … as a gift from a man. She never gets
to give it away” (p. 195). Freud and Lévi-Strauss see
necessity and culture in the sex/gender system, while Rubin hopes that
exposure of its phallic roots to the light of thoughtful, feminist inquiry
will kill the damn thing (Rubin 1975,
197–99).
As rich and provocative as Rubin's essay is, she concedes one
crucial, originary point of Freud's: the assumption of the seemingly
ontological sanctity of the phallus as (a symbol of) the penis (or vice
versa). What do children find so compelling about the phallus? Why is the
boy so fearful of being castrated by his father and becoming a girl? Why
do girls desire the penis/phallus? Rubin's answer, unlike
Freud's, claims to eschew biologism but leaves no other alternative.
Drawing a distinction between the penis and the phallus, Rubin argues that
the meanings imbued in masculinity are social artifacts, not biological
ones (1975, 190). Thus, the phallus is valued
because it allows one to participate in the gift economy in which the
phallus is valued.
This tautology begs the central questions: What is the
phallus and why is it valued at all? What is so special about
that penis/phallus that it gives one a privileged access to the gift
economy in the first place? Why even bother with this near synonym?28
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
“phallus” is from the ancient Greek word meaning penis. In
English it means: “An image of the male generative organ,
symbolizing the generative power in nature, venerated in various religious
systems; spec. that carried in solemn procession in the Dionysiac
festivals in ancient Greece. In later times commonly worn as an amulet or
protection against the evil eye.”
Why not be explicit,
recognizing that a “penis” is inextricably zippered within the
teeth of “phallic” meanings that have numerous metonymic
associations, as do many words? Why worry that a penis might come free and
float around as a biological menace and not a symbolic one, as though the
two could be separate that way, as though the worries about
“biology” are not themselves best figured through a
phenomenology of that sign as well? We use these other metonymies of
“sex” or “breast” or “womb” without
veiling them in a more decent garb. To do otherwise with the penis seems
akin to the filmic double standard that allows frontal female nudity but
not a view of male genitalia (
Mulvey 1989). One
function of the name of the phallus is to perform an authority that the penis
cannot possibly elicit on its own. The language of the penis is the emperor
with no clothes. The phallus is the costume that makes the penis the fetish,
the possibility of something fancy that invites imagination about the
penis's potency that goes far beyond its actual biological functions.
Rubin notes that the relation of the phallus to the gift economy only
makes sense if we assume its origins in “paleolithic relations of
sexuality” that are still with us. “We still live,” she
writes “in a ‘phallic’ culture” (1975, 191). But paleolithic cultures, having no
understanding of fathers as we now understand them, much less of the role
men played in impregnating women, were obsessed with the womb and with
birth (e.g., Neumann 1964; Rich 1976, 84–109), or at least there is far
more evidence for this pre-history than the one Rubin borrows from Freud,
that of the primal horde that Bettelheim notes has no data in its support
(1962, 42, 61). In compensation for the lack of
a womb and anger at the humiliation that entails, and out of a fear of
reproducing the initial experience of dependence—all experiences
wrought in early childhood fantasies about mothers—men
apparently organize their public, social lives through the manipulation of
women and things. In the cultures Mauss and Lévi-Strauss consider,
including those of modern Europe, this is done through various kinship and
clan systems.
The Womb in the Gift Economy
As much as the penis represents desire, it may also be the sine qua
non of a lack, and as much as the penis allows men to possess women and
things, it seems born of ressentiment, a sign of men's
experience of ultimate dependence and humiliation. Recognition of this
helps untangle a piece of Rubin's exchange system that is at least as
mystifying as the role of women: the role of the gift. Why attach such
importance to these objects? What explains how a cow, some shells, or a
piece of jewelry might be viewed as an equivalent to a woman (Mauss 1967; Strathern 1988)?
One can understand the desire for the women, but how does this enable an
exchange if the other object is not even a human being? Understanding
fantasies about this so-called phallic mother, one who reminds the boy of
the penis's futility compared with her fertility, helps to explain
the tendency to imbue property with a sacred importance. Boys, sensing
from early on a power associated with the womb and their own inability to
give birth, spend their lives attempting to overcome their initial
humiliation in the originary moment of any gift economy, which is the gift
of life from the mother to the child.29
For
further accounts of men's compensatory excesses, see Lerner (1986, especially 45–46), which includes a
literature review on this subject.
By highlighting the metonymies
among feces, gifts, babies, and penises, Freud himself illustrates the basis
of these associations and substitutions (
Freud
[1909b] 1955).
Reconciliations
Feminist Lacanian theory, object relations theory, and especially
Freud in his early work offer themes consistent with a return to theories
of pregnancy envy. Hence, those comfortable with any of these literatures
may find reasons therein to consider the uses of a pregnancy-envy
narrative. The case for pregnancy envy is made implicitly by some feminist
Lacanians themselves, especially Kaja Silverman (1988, 1992a, 1992b), who appreciates what she calls the pre-Oedipal
aspects of desire for the mother. The fetishes and drives that she lists,
although far more expansive than the Freudian Oedipal denominator of the
penis, do not include pregnancy envy. Perhaps they should, because this
would accommodate her desire to explain how the boy's early bond with
his mother that is not primarily sexual would nonetheless lead to a
valuation of the penis, the site of difference.
Analyses from feminist object relations theory also may accommodate
recognition of pregnancy envy. First, object relations theory insists that
gender identity emerges before children engage in any sexual
triangles with their parents. According to Jessica Benjamin,
“children consolidate a fixed unalterable sense of gender in the
first two years of life, well before the onset of the Oedipal
complications Freud described” (1988, 90).
If gender identity occurs before the fear of castration, then the penis
cannot be, at least initially, valued for its promise of redemption from a
lack, hence prompting inquiry into another explanation for its
significance. Second, Benjamin maintains that “maternal
identification is the initial orientation for children of both
sexes…. [G]irls sustain the primary identification with
the mother while boys must switch to an identification with the
father” (ibid.). This is consistent with
the notion that boys initially think themselves, like their mothers,
capable of giving birth. Hence, the movement away from this
self-understanding might be significant to boys' developmental
self-discovery. Third, boys view their mothers as omnipotent, and
themselves as dependent: “While the little boy may consciously
represent the mother as castrated, clinical evidence reveals that
unconsciously the boy sees this mother as extremely powerful. She does not
appear lacking a sexual organ; rather her vagina is known and feared for
its potential to re-engulf the boy” (Benjamin
1988, 94, citing Chasseguet-Smirgel
1970). Mothers are also understood as omnipotent because of their
role as exclusive caregivers. As opposed to Freud, who says that children
cannot imagine the “protector” being a woman, object relations
theorists hold that women as mothers are the essence of omnipotence,
because they nurse and care for children. If ensuring life is power, then
what could be phenomenologically more powerful, at least from the point of
view of someone recently born, than the act of giving birth? Freud's
adult timidity toward his own overbearing mother, his acceptance of his
wife Martha's refusal to let him participate in raising his children,
his melancholia and persistent anxieties about death, his insistence that
he have the sole prerogative to name his six children and many of their
children, and his secret, unorthodox analysis of his daughter Anna all
point to the role of pregnancy envy in the establishment of psychoanalytic
theory's father, whose naming of children is a defensive act and not
a triumphant one.30
These biographical
references are from Paul Roazen (1993, 96, 110,
130, 140, 154, 155, 168, 190, 194, 195), who writes: “Curiously
enough for the discoverer of the Oedipus complex, Freud's mother was
the dictatorial person, whereas his father seems to have been kindly and
improvident” (p. 190), quoting Roazen ([1969] 1990: 119–20).
Further evidence for emphasizing the significance of the womb and
giving birth in children's imaginations comes from Freud himself. In
contrast to his Oedipal model, whereby relations are presumed to be
(hetero)sexually charged unconsciously (no one states that
three-year-old boys actually try to have intercourse with their mothers or
even talk about it), he realizes that two-year-old girls and boys
consciously mimic their pregnant mothers. Boys will put pillows or dolls
under their shirts and announce with pride that they too will be having
babies. Little boys, when told they cannot have babies, after recovering
from their surprise and confusion, become defiant. The notorious
“Little Hans” tells his father he gave birth to children and
his father responds, “You know quite well that boys can't have
children,” to which Hans says, “Well, yes. But I believe they
can all the same” (Freud [1909a]
1955, 10: 94–95). At another point, on watching Hans play
with his imaginary children, the father says: “You know quite well a
boy can't have any children.” And Hans replies: “I know.
I was their Mommy before, now I'm their Daddy” (ibid. 96–97). Hans also projects this ability to
his own father (ibid., 87):
[Father]: Boys don't have children. Only
Mummies have children.
Hans: But why shouldn't I?
[Father]: Because God's arranged it like
that.
Hans: But why don't you have one? Oh yes, you'll
have one alright. Just you wait . .
And this at four and one-half years, in the midst of the Oedipal stage
that presumably straightens all this out.31
Since I began this research 15 years ago, numerous parents
have supplied anecdotal accounts of their sons' pregnancy fantasies.
For instance: “I can too have a baby!” two-year-old David
replied to his mother after she said he could not. Jacob at the age of
three was often pregnant with three to five babies whom he had also named,
although his mother was not pregnant.
This scenario finds confirmation in a larger empirical study
indicating that boys from three to five years have vivid pregnancy
fantasies, regardless of their mothers' appearance. Dr. Linda Linday
writes that her own curiosity on boys' pregnancy envy was piqued by
her three-year-old son when he “repeatedly stuffed a small doll
under his shirt and said ‘I have a baby in my “room”
[womb]’” (1994, 416),
although Linday herself was not pregnant. Her study found that
mothers' reports on their preschoolers' gender fantasies showed
“no statistically significant difference between the percentage of
girls (14/31 = 45%) reported to have penis/gender fantasies and
the percentage of boys (15/34 = 44%) reported to have pregnancy
fantasies” (p. 418).
One reason for pregnancy envy in boys is that two-year-olds do not
know that penises may play a role in reproduction. Freud himself
recognized the significance of this. In “Some Psychical
Consequences,” after stating that a girl gains her sexual identity
when she realizes she does not have a penis, Freud adds in a footnote that
this observation is at odds with his observation 20 years earlier that
children's “sexual interest … was aroused not by the
difference between the sexes, but by the problem of where babies come
from” (Freud 1925] 1955, 21: n.
252, emphasis added).32
Freud's
retraction here is odd because much of his subsequent work relies heavily
on just these passages, including his discussion of “Little
Hans” ([1909a] 1955, 10:
101).
Translator James Strachey adds, in a bracketed portion, that
this earlier sentiment “appears in more than one place,” and he
cites three other examples.
33
In this early work, Freud (
[1905]
1955) sets the stage for an entirely different enactment of the
Oedipal drama, one that addresses the question “Who am I?” by
considering the question “Where do babies come
from?”—not who has the penis: “[T]he first
problem with which [the child's sexual curiosity] deals is
not the question of the distinction between the sexes, but the riddle of
where babies come from?” (
[1905]
1955, 7: 194).
34 Rank echoes the
reading, saying he follows Karl Abraham in noting the “vaginal
symbolism of the ravine in the Oedipal sage” and describing
Oedipus's blindness as a metaphorical return to the womb (Rank 1952, 43), suggesting parallels among knowing,
being, and being born.
Other studies suggest that the preoccupation with this question may
arise earlier than Freud indicates, closer to age two than to three.35
Freud states that children's curiosity
about reproductive organs begins between the ages of three and five ([1905] 1955, 7: 54). But see Benjamin (1988) and Chodorow (1978),
who point out that recognition of differences between the sexes and
consciousness of women giving birth occur around the age of two, or around
the time children begin to speak.
His point here is persuasive.
Not only do children connect the question of who they are with the problem
of birth, but they also connect birth with mothers and have little
understanding of how fathers contribute to this process:
Children also perceive the alterations that take place in
their mother owing to pregnancy and are able to interpret them correctly.
The fable of the stork is often told to an audience that receives it with
a deep, though mostly silent, mistrust. Two elements remain undiscovered
by the sexual researches of children: the fertilizing role of semen and
the existence of the female sexual orifice. (Freud
[1905] 1955, 7: 196–97)
If we follow Freud's initial ideas about infantile sexuality and
consider these alongside works by objects relations theorists and writings
on pregnancy envy, it appears that sex identity develops in response to
the mother, the one who is the source of one's existence. This is the
origin of the sexed other, the boy who cannot maintain this identity, this
power, who experiences his difference as many things, but especially here
as a lack (Kittay 1983).
The girl may experience the lack of a penis (Linday
1994), but far more crucially, the girl is potentially a little
mother and the boy a little not-mother. The mother is the one who first
renders her child as identical with her and eventually as a son incapable
of bearing children. This is the phallic, or rather the omnipotent, mother
(Rogin 1989). She is the source of the
boy's ressentiment, since at this young age, he is
overinvested in birth and cannot fathom being restricted from this
activity. That this also occurs at the same moment when the mother is
pushing the son away, encouraging him to be more separate, makes for a
double resentment: Not only can he not be a mother, but he cannot have her
either. Each of these upset fantasies leads in turn to compensatory
masculine myths about phallic power and even birth-giving abilities, as
well as a heightened interest in developing strategies to hold onto
mother. In humiliation, boys renounce the mother and fetishize their lack.
Politically, masculine compensation manifests at its most basic structural
level in the urge to control reproduction, to determine rules that govern
the traffic in mothers and their children.
Freud points out the repression of these infant and toddler
experiences. Far from a boy's preoccupation with pregnancy leading to
any especially erratic psychological development, Hans grows up to be a
happy adult who, when shown this account, “did not recognize
himself” (Freud [1909a] 1955,
10: 148). Boys, we may infer, can have ongoing and repeated pregnancy
fantasies that they will not recall as such when they grow up into
supposedly well-adjusted adults, such as Hans's father—the one
reporting their exchanges. Consider the following (ibid., 10: 92).
[Father]: Do you know why you wish for
[a baby]? It's because you'd like to be a
Daddy.
Hans: Yes … How does it work?
[Father]: How does what
work?
Hans: You say Daddies don't have babies, so how
does it work, my wanting to be a Daddy?
[Father]: You'd like to be a Daddy
and married to Mummy; you'd like to be as big as me and have a
moustache; and you'd like Mummy to have a baby
…
In this passage, we see the way that men (Hans's father) act on
marriage fantasies as a means of achieving their desire for the baby. To
be a Daddy requires being “married to a Mummy” so that Mummy
can give one a baby, which is what Hans wants, too. Hans and his father
seem normal only because they and other adult men have managed to enact
kinship rules that allow them to pursue a desire for a Mummy to have their
babies, desires based on childhood fantasies about the importance to being
of bearing children (Stevens 1999,
209–35). Indeed “matrimony” is from the Latin
matrix, meaning uterus. Men cannot have a uterus, but they can
acquire one through marriage.
