ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH SIGMUND FREUD has been castigated by many feminists for apparently basing his notion of penis envy, or "the girl's perception of herself and all those like her as inferior castrates," on an assumption of male superiority, it is not clear that his work on female sexuality should be dismissed with a mere wave of the hand. l Given that psychoanalytic feminists have found within Freud liberating as well as oppressive streams of thought, it is worth our effort to understand precisely what Freud said about female sexuality. Only then will we be able to appreciate what is ground breaking about feminist revisions and reinterpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis. D
among his contemporaries. The intensity of this controversy was not due merely to Freud's having publicly addressed formerly taboo topics: homosexuality, sadism, masochism, oral, and anal sex. Nor was the intensity due solely to the fact that many of his theories struck his readers as counterintuitive. Rather the intensity of the controversy was due largely to Freud's suggestion that all sexual "aberrations," "variations," and "perversions" can be and usually are stages in the development of what he identified as normal human sexuality. 2
According to Freud, children go through distinct psychosexual development stages, and the temperament of any given adult is the product of how he/she deals with these stages. Gender, in other words, is the product of sexual maturation. Because they experience their sexuality differently (as a result of biology), girls and boys ultimately end up with contrasting gender roles. If men adjust to their sexual maturation normally (that is, typically), they will end up displaying expected masculine traits; if women develop normally, they will end up displaying expected feminine
traits. Although Freud admitted that to some extent we are all androgynous, he wanted to say that, by virtue of anatomy, women should develop feminine traits and men masculine ones.3
