ABSTRACT
Jeanne Lampl de Groot emphasises the importance of the girl’s attachment to the mother prior to her encountering the castration complex. She thus considers the castration complex in girls to be a secondary formation that succeeds an earlier ‘negative Oedipus complex’ in which the girl’s mother is her love object and the father her rival. Further, it is only from the negative Oedipus complex that the castration complex derives its psychic significance. Such emphasis on this early negative complex, she argues, might throw more light on disturbances encountered in the mental life of women, for instance, the denial of sexual desire and frigidity. This ‘object relations’ approach which stresses the early attachment to the mother is supported by two cases, one of whom had earlier been in treatment with van Ophuijsen. It is this study that Freud has in mind when he refers to Lampl de Groot in his 1931 paper, ‘Female Sexuality’.
