Penis Envy

The concept ‘penis envy’, which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women – that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era – was seized in this country in the 1940s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. Many who preached the doctrine of endangered femininity reversing the movement of American women towards independence and identity, never knew its Freudian origin. Many who seized on it – not the few psychoanalysts, but the many popularisers, sociologists, educators, ad-agency manipulators, magazine writers, child experts, marriage counsellors, ministers, cocktail-party authorities – could not have known what Freud himself mean by penis envy. One needs only to know what Freud was describing, in those Victorian women, to see the fallacy in literally applying his theory of femininity to women today. And one needs only to know why he described it in that way to understand that much of it is obsolescent contradicted by knowledge that is part of every social scientist’s thinking today, but was not yet known in Freud’s time.