ABSTRACT
The psychical consequences of envy for the penis, in so far as it does not become absorbed in the réaction-formation of the masculinity complex, are various and far-reaching. After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attem pt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishm ent personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so im portant a respect, and, at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man.Even after penis-envy has abandoned its true object, it continues to exist: by an easy displacement it persists in the charac-ter-trait of jealousy. O f course, jealousy is not limited to one sex and has a wider foundation than this, but I am of opinion that it plays a far larger part in the mental life of women than of men and that is because it is enormously reinforced from the direction of displaced penis-envy. While I was still unaware of this source of jealousy and was considering the phantasy ‘a child is being beaten’, which occurs so commonly in girls, I constructed a first phase for it in which its meaning was that another child, a rival of whom the subject was jealous, was to be beaten. This phantasy seems to be a relic of the phallic period in girls. The peculiar rigidity which struck me so much in the monotonous formula ‘a child is being beaten’ can probably be interpreted in a special way. The child which is being beaten (or caressed) may ultimately be nothing more nor less than the clitoris itself, so that at its very lowest level the statement will contain a confession of masturbation, which has remained attached to the content of the formula from its beginning in the phallic phase till later life.A third consequence of penis-envy seems to be a loosening of the girl’s affectionate relation with her maternal object. The situation as a whole is not very clear, but it can be seen that in the end the girl’s mother, who sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped, is almost always held responsible for her lack of a penis. The way in which this comes about historically is often that soon after the girl has discovered that her genitals are unsatisfactory she begins to show jealousy of another child on the ground that her mother is fonder of it than of her, which serves as a reason for her giving up her attachment to her mother. It will fit in with this if the child which has been preferred by her mother is made into the first object of the beating-phantasy which ends in masturbation.
