ABSTRACT
Chapter One has already illustrated that, for Freud, the riddle of sexuality in childhood sexual researches comes to an end with the discovery of the anatomical differences. This discovery was synonymous with the concept of castration complex for Freud between 1907 and 1909. Chapter Two examined Freud’s 1925 text and we learnt that the discovery of sexual differences have different consequences in the psyches of the boy and the girl. In other words, we examined Freud’s theories on the psychical consequences of castration as described in 1925. In this chapter, we try to understand how Freud conceptualised the little girl’s negotiation of the riddles of sexuality in the 1930s. According to Grigg (1999) and Strachey’s editorial note to “The infantile genital organization” (1923e), “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex” (1924d), and “Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes” (1925j) are three of Freud’s important contributions that sparked off a heated debate in the psychoanalytic circle between the 1920s and 1930s on the question of female sexuality. Known as the Freud–Jones debate, it not only revolved around the question of what constitutes femininity and its relation to the phallus, or the phallic stage, as Freud articulated in the 38above mentioned texts from 1923 and 1924, but also heated discussion took place on the question of object-relation, particularly that of the mother and the child. Two of the most controversial proposals of Freud that influenced the great debate on female sexuality were (1) that there is only one libido and that is masculine, even in the case of the little girl, and (2) that, for Freud, female psychosexual development is all about how “a woman develops out of a child with a bi-sexual disposition” (1933a, p. 116). While the first proposal seems to be the primary topic in “Female sexuality” (1931b), the second text, “Femininity” (1933a, Lecture XXXIII, pp. 112–135) seems to be focusing more on Freud’s second proposal.
