ABSTRACT
In this paper, which is based on eleven case studies of female homosexuality, Deutsch traces the genesis of female homosexuality. She considers that sexual inversion is a return to the primary fixation to the mother caused by a flight from the father and is a regressive relation along active/passive (rather than masculine/feminine) lines. Here more than ever before Deutsch emphasises the little girl’s attachment to hatred for the mother.
The analysis revolves around the castration complex. Unlike van Ophuijsen, Deutsch talks about an exaggerated penis envy rather than a ‘masculinity complex’. In her view, the female homosexual’s sexual excitement is bound up with the maternal prohibition and with the consequent intense aggressive impulses towards the mother.
In all of the cases examined, she argues, the mother-child relation at pregenital levels dominates the perverse relationship with the love object. Thus, the little girl who feels rejected by her father because of denial, disappointment or anxiety, turns back to the mother for protection and peace. A subsequent direct prohibition of masturbation and interference with the activity unleashes the daughter’s hostility against the disciplinary mother. It is, besides, through phallic masturbation that the affective discovery of the anatomical deficiency occurs.
Deutsch throws into relief the dangers of the passive phase. There is first a libidinal masochistic danger due to the expectation that the father might fulfil the daughter’s wishes, secondly a danger of losing the newly chosen object because of a refusal on the father’s part, and thirdly dangers of narcissistic injury of the ego libido resulting from the realization of the lack of penis.
Deutsch endorses the views of both Freud and Jones about the disposition to female homosexuality in the oral-sadistic phase.
