ABSTRACT
Early psychoanalysis held that the libidinal phases leading to the ideal of maturity constitute a sequence that oscillates back and forth. The psychological mechanism of the shift of the sensitive zone from the clitoris to the vagina is a complicated one, and the fact that many women never give up clitoral excitation in favour of the vagina bears witness to the difficulty of the transition. The task of the completely achieved female attitude is not the satisfaction in the sex act of the infantile wish for a penis, but the successful discovery of the vagina as an organ of pleasure, the exchange of the wish for a penis for the real and equivalent possession of the vagina. The difficulty arises from the circumstances that bisexually constituted development interposes the male clitoris between the anus and the vagina. The whole process of menstruation is certainly well adapted to having an eroticizing and preparing affect on the vagina.
