Issues with my mother... I mean Freud. Freud!

In Sigmund Freud’s work, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love he gives his theory for homosexuality in women as a more convoluted form of the Oedipus Complex. From what I can gather there are two main ways (according to Freud) that a woman can become a homosexual: One is through penis envy; and the other comes from the girl “retiring in favor of” leaving men to her mother. I have a hard time believing either of these, though if I had to choose the most plausible I would have to choose the penis envy one (but even that one’s a stretch for me). I will look at both cases somewhat in depth and explain my disbelief afterwards.

Penis envy, it’s exactly what you think it means. According to Freud, penis envy occurs when a young girl first sees a male naked and notices that he has a penis and she does not, this is a traumatic experience for the girl as it makes her feel as though she’s lacking in something. This can then go one of three ways, she can transfer her desire for a penis into an attraction for men, by way of taking her father as a love object and trying to find a man like him; she can renounce sexuality altogether; or she can develop a desire to obtain this penis by taking on the characteristics of being a man, thus becoming a homosexual woman. Freud doesn’t exactly say what causes a woman to choose one of these paths, but they eventually all do, as they seem to cover all the bases. My problem is that this is a very male-centric viewpoint being taken. What’s to say that the girl will see a naked boy and jump to the conclusion that he is her superior? It was brought up by one of the people in my group that the boy does not suffer from ‘breast envy’ when being breastfed, so why should the girl feel penis envy?

The second of Freud’s theories is a bit more complicated to explain, but no less hard to swallow. The little girl goes through a female Oedipus Complex transferring her object of love from her mother to her father, whom she realizes desires to have a male child. The girl then desires to give her father the child but for whatever reason, she comes to the realization that this cannot happen (this is either due to the superego’s (the part of the brain that deals with social norms) awareness in the girls mind, or the fact that her mother has given birth, and not her). So, as a form of disappointment, the girl gives up taking men for her love-object, as she realizes that she cannot compete with her mother. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Freud then claims that the girl becomes a male and goes through a second Oedipal Complex, this time from the perspective of the boy (hating his father and loving his mother), thus she has a sort of androgynous quality about her. This theory seems very convoluted, and seems like Freud had a fairly solid theory with the Oedipal Complex but found no obvious way for it to apply to women. I dare say that he worked backwards with the Oedipal Complex and tried to accommodate it for women. Accommodation does not necessarily render an argument invalid, but Freud’s seems forced.

Freud had some very revolutionary ideas and the simple fact that he was trying to unravel sexuality in his time is worthy of accolade in itself. I am, by no means, claiming that I beat Freud by refuting his claims because when it comes down to it, Freud was a doctor, and a founder of an acclaimed school of psychology, and my claim to fame is being an avid fan of Dune. I do, however, have some qualms about his theories and their applications.