Dancing Outside the Box

Freudian Slips

Footnotes to Freud’s “penis envy” and “castration complex” theories.

In Freud’s Penis Envy theory young girls envy their brothers’ penises and wish they had such an appendage themselves. In his Castration Complex, young boys fear being castrated by their fathers due to their Oedipus Complex, ie, their desire to have sex with their mothers. These theories were published by Freud in the last years of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th Century, a time when Victorian repression still dominated life in the United States and in much of Europe.

My mother, born in 1902, grew up in a typical Victorian household. The only naked body she saw growing up was her own. After hearing rumors from her friends that the male body was somehow different, at the age of fifteen, when her parents were out of the house, she climbed on a chair before the bookcase in their bedroom and took down a medical book.

In it she found a sketch of the naked male body and fainted dead away.

It is hard to see how she could have suffered from penis envy as a child. Surely before girls feel this envy, they need to know that males have penises. My mother’s experience clearly indicates that not all girls back then when Freud was writing knew enough to feel deprived.

My husband Stephen was born in 1915. His parents were both born in Europe and came to the United States as young adults, bringing their Victorian beliefs with them. Like my mother, Stephen grew up in a home that was not open to sharing anatomical knowledge. He had an older sister and somehow knew girls and women were built differently but had no idea what the difference was.

According to his adult recollection, he spent his childhood trying somehow to get a glimpse of what his mother looked like between her legs. She wore full skirts, ankle length, and as a small boy he tried to crawl in under her skirt when she wasn’t looking to get a peek. Unfortunately he failed every time he tried.

As he grew older he had a better idea. His family lived on a farm with an outhouse. At the age of nine he began digging a hole behind the outhouse, hoping to tunnel in under the outhouse seat so he could spy on his mother when she lowered her underclothes to sit.

His father caught him digging and put an immediate stop to his plan.

A few years later his older brother, who by then was chasing and fondling girls, generously shared some information with him on how girls were formed.

It’s hard to believe that during his years of complete ignorance of female anatomy he was worried that his father would cut off his penis to punish him. As far as he knew, his mother had a penis too or something similar.

It’s also hard to believe that the young boys and girls of Austria when Freud and those who later became his patients were growing up had a sophisticated understanding of anatomy and sexuality despite the fact that their parents answered any sex questions evasively or not at all.

Freud had a patient named Hans who at the age of three and a half saw his baby sister naked. He saw she had no penis and concluded that it would grow and become visible when she was older. Freud concluded that poor little Hans was deliberately avoiding the truth – that half the members of the human race don’t have penises – rather than deciding that Hans’ guess wasn’t that illogical.

This incident clearly tells us that Hans had never seen his mother or any other female in the nude prior to seeing his baby sister naked. He assumed – just as my mother had assumed – that every human being was built pretty much the way he was. That is an uninformed but not an irrational assumption. Freud then decides that this uninformed little boy growing up in a household in which his sex questions are never answered, a household where adult nudity is not allowed even before very young children, will harbor a fear that his father will whack off his penis due to his desire to have sex with his mother. Freud believed the castration complex came to life in little boys between the ages of three and five. In deciding this he is injecting into an uninformed, unsophisticated little boy an incredible sophistication while completely ignoring the crucial work the child is actually engaged in doing.

Rejecting the way she had been raised, my mother did her best to expose her children to anatomical knowledge when we were still so young we would accept it as we accepted all the new knowledge pouring in.

I raised my two sons the same way. They could toddle in to watch their father bathe or to watch me bathe. No need to check out a medical book or to try to tunnel in under an outhouse. Daddy was built one way, Mommy another. They were both built like Daddy and knew they were boys and I was a girl. Nothing about this seemed to disturb them.

When one of my sons was about three, one evening when I had lifted him out of the tub and was reaching for a towel to dry him, I turned back to see him attempting to push his penis back between his legs, peering down at himself as he did this. Apparently he wanted to see how he would look if he were built like me instead of like his father. As I started to dry him he let go of his penis and smiled at me. I sensed no strong emotion of any kind.

My sister Nan told me about something that had happened when her oldest son Johnny was six years old. Her husband Arthur had left the house at three in the morning to go deep sea fishing. She woke up about an hour later to find her son asleep on Arthur’s side of the bed. She shrugged it off and settled down to go back to sleep.

Sometime later something happened that took her completely by surprise. Her son suddenly shot up in bed and cried out, “I’ll go get a knife and cut it off.” Then he dropped back down and went back to sleep.

In the morning her son insisted on staying at her side, which was totally unlike him. This was a Saturday but he told his mother he loved her too much to go out to play. He insisted that he loved her too much to be parted from her ever. He wanted to be with her allllllll day.

Nan and I both laughed. It was clear to both of us that her son had decided to keep his penis, which frightened him a little. He loved and needed his mother far more than he loved or needed his abusive father. He had to make her see how much he loved her so she wouldn’t be angry at him for deciding not to castrate himself, to continue being a boy and not join her team.

Nan’s story made it clear there are other ways to explain a young boy’s castration fantasies/fears that have little to do with the Oedipal Complex or fear of the father and everything to do with forging a gender identity.

Johnny at six had the advantage of being fully aware of the structural difference between his parents as he decided who he was going to be. Little Hans at three and a half wasn’t aware of this difference and at six was probably still not aware. However, there were many other differences between his parents that he would have been fully aware of and he would surely have been told numerous times that he was a boy who would one day be a man, crucial information as he settled on an identity.