ABSTRACT
Going through the writings which compare the sexual maturation of the little girl and the little boy, you find that in spite of the divergences which separate them, there is often a shared error which brings them together. A confusion appears between the penis as object of phallic narcissism and the penis as instrument of Eros. This confusion leads to the idea that the boy, possessor of the penis, is more capable of integrating his drives than the girl. Now narcissism and eroticism don’t get on well together, as we will often have occasion to recall. There is an ordinary expression which signifies this: ‘sexual impotence’. Potency is a narcissistic quality. The fact is that the impotent man thinks of his sexual activity as a form of potency, and this, moreover, is why he is not impotent, but inhibited in his erotic capacity. And it is the narcissistic investment, fixated onto this instrument which he fears losing if he uses it, which leads to this state. Phallic narcissism, a direct consequence of the castration complex, constitutes for the man a way of emerging from the Oedipal conflict. If the superego is the inheritor of the Oedipus complex, then phallic narcissism is an inheritance which comes from the father, and to a certain extent, like any inheritance, it consecrates the father. This inheritance contains in particular the reality principle. So the boy who has developed in normality-inducing conditions treats the core of anxiety hysteria that he experiences at the moment of his Oedipal conflict in a way that ensures its repression and thus issues in a phallic narcissism pregnant with an ego ideal based on the reality principle. Our reason for having just given this explanation is above all to make it clear that this course of development determines a libidinal economy which is different according to sex, and we insist on the term ‘different’, for the affirmation that the penis, by its very existence, ensures a better integration of the drives is a judgement which shows that the reality defined by phallic narcissism is not always the truth. Rather, the presence of the penis as a perception experienced via the parents sets going a series of reactions which are of primordial importance in the determinism of
sexual identity. So we can expect that the difference of the sexes will be pregnant with a different libidinal economy, and that the absence of a visible penis in the girl entails for her a set of responses which will make her adopt an economic system that cannot be superimposed on the boy’s. Our point of view already allows us to sense in advance that the famous masculine protest has to do with this mode of distribution of the libidinal economy.
