ABSTRACT
First presented at the Tenth International Congress of Psycho-Analysis in Innsbruck on 1st September 1927, Jones’s paper appeared in print in October of the same year.
Jones starts with Freud’s now well known claim about the inadequacy of psychoanalytic knowledge regarding female sexuality. He sides with Horney in seeing the cultural bias against women as one of the reasons for this inadequacy and he puts forward his own claim concerning the phallocentric bias of male analysts. Jones explores two questions. The first is the very same question that Carl Müller-Braunschweig (see above) had raised in the same journal the previous year: what, in women, corresponds to the fear of castration? His second question is: what differentiates the path of homosexual women from that of heterosexual women?
Jones has two major objections to the notion of castration: first that the psychoanalytic concept of castration is equated with the abolition of sexuality, as opposed to a partial threat to sexual enjoyment; and second that penis envy in women is partial and secondary, from which he concludes that the threat of castration is also partial and secondary. In the place of castration, Jones proposes another concept, ‘aphanisis’, for the total and permanent loss of the capacity for sexual enjoyment. In his view, this is the real ‘bedrock’ of the neuroses. Along with Deutsch and Klein, interestingly enough, Jones argues that while no woman escapes penis envy, it only plays a small role in neurosis.
In his version of psychosexual developmental stages, Jones construes Freud’s phallic phase as a secondary, defensive construction rather than as a phase in its own right. Also, he claims that the Oedipus conflict is resolved in the same way for boys and girls: both either give up their love-object or their own sex. The latter choice yields two types of homosexuality in women, both marked in their fixation to the oral-sadistic stage. The first type is characterized by an intense oral eroticism, dependence on women and disinterest in men; the second type is characterized by sadism, a wish to obtain recognition of her male attributes and resentment towards men, played out in castrating (biting) fantasies.
