Penis envy

The concept of “penis envy” has led lots of people – those with penises and those without – down many a garden path.

I grew up believing – as I imagine you did – that Freud thought women envied men their penises. Turns out, this isn’t quite right. Or rather, it’s not complete.

The first instance I’ve found of Freud mentioning “penis envy” is in his 1908 essay, “On the Sexual Theories of Children” [PEP-web subscription required], in which he introduces the most widely understood portion of his theory of penis envy:

[T]here is some truth in the infantile sexual theory that women, like men, possess a penis. It is easy to observe that little girls fully share their brother’s opinion of it. They develop a great interest in that part of the boy’s body. But this interest promptly falls under the sway of envy. They feel themselves unfairly treated. They make attempts to micturate in the posture that is made possible for boys by their possessing a big penis; and when a girl declares that ‘she would rather be a boy’, we know what deficiency her wish is intended to put right.

The most interesting reference I’ve found, though, is in a 1915 revision to his 1905 essay, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in which he wrote about what he called the “castration complex and penis envy,”:

[T]he existence of two sexes does not to begin with arouse any difficulties or doubts in children. It is self-evident to a male child that a genital like his own is to be attributed to everyone he knows, and he cannot make its absence tally with his picture of these other people…. This conviction is energetically maintained by boys, is obstinately defended against the contradictions which soon result from observation, and is only abandoned after severe internal struggles (the castration complex). The substitutes for this penis which they feel is missing in women play a great part in determining the form taken by many perversions.

Interesting, right?

Here, he’s not even writing about women. (He’s not even imagining women exist as subjects; they only are objects of boys’ curiosity.) He’s saying boys have a hard time imagining women don’t envy men their penises. Seems pretty different from what most of us imagine! And – and maybe here I’m being too generous – but and – I imagine that, had Freud lived a bit longer, he might have gone back and revised this paragraph (and his many later paragraphs and papers further elaborating on this thesis) to reflect both the possibility that boys might also/instead envy women their vaginas, and that girls might imagine their own genitalia superior, that boys and men might envy them their genitalia.

I’ve been reading Freud pretty closely for a few years now, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that Freud only reached conclusions provisionally. To read Freud is to read Freud correcting himself, revising his previous opinions. Freud died in 1939. Had he lived longer, he would, surely, have continued to revise himself. His predilection for self-criticism, for revision, to my mind largely insulates him from many of his most virulent critics who came a generation or three later. I have no doubt that, were Freud alive today, he’d be at the vanguard – on just about every subject. But that’s not my point, here.

The way I’ve come to understand “penis envy” is kinda the opposite of Sinead O’Connor’s “I do not want what I haven’t got“: we always want what we haven’t got. Not in a gendered way; in a general way. Men envy women their breasts, their clitorises, their wombs. Women envy men their penises. Yes. They do. In both directions. Women can give birth; men envy that. Men can walk safely down the street; women envy that. Women have a sexual organ devoted entirely to pleasure! There’s no man alive with remote familiarity with the clitoris who doesn’t envy it!

Richard Henry Stoddard wrote, “We love in others what we lack ourselves, and would be everything but what we are.” This is what I’ve taken from Freud’s concept of penis envy and, I would wager, is something like what most analysts take from it.

All the rest? It’s just a distraction.

AI note: I used Dall-E to generate the”featured image” – the woman green with envy on the front page – my prompt was something like “a very envious woman,” followed by four or five iterations of “make her more envious.” I used Midjourney, via Discord, to generate the images below. My prompt was, “An abstract representation of the Freudian concept of ‘penis envy’.” Interestingly, these images look to me more like vagina or clitoris envy.