Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis by Wilhelm Reich

Author:Wilhelm Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER SIX

On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Genitality

Pre-psychoanalytic psychology was unable to formulate the problem of the development of genital tendencies because it was working from the premise that the sexual instinct “awakens” during puberty as a result of somatic developmental processes, that is, that it emerges all at once, not merely as an internal impulse but also as a will directed toward a heterosexual object in the outside world. Freud was the first to differentiate between drive aim and drive object and, in addition, to confirm the existence of pregenital sexual phases through which libido passes during the first years of life, before the pregenital tendencies are consolidated and become subject to genital primacy. The question then arose whether pregenital forms of sexuality are simply replaced by genital forms or actually contribute, somehow, to the creation of genital primacy. This question involved not only the development of physiological sensitivity in the genital erogenous zone but also the problems of how the child’s mental attitudes and experiences participate in this process and which motives form the basis for heterosexual object selection. Thus, a distinction must be made between a number of specific issues: the emergence of genital excitation (drive goal); the development of psychogenital object love (drive object); and the genetic relationship between the two (interrelationship between drive and experience).

Freud’s original view was that genital primacy does not exist prior to puberty and that the pregenital partial drives are brought under the primacy of the genitals only during puberty.1 Later he revised this theory,2 stating that genital primacy was established in childhood during the so-called phallic phase of libido development. This occurs in both sexes in the same manner: in men, penis pride arises as the most powerful support of male self-confidence; in women, penis envy is the basis of female inferiority feelings and of the compensations for them.3 Here, “masculinity exists but not femininity; the opposites are male genitalia or castrated genitalia.4 Only when this development is completed, during puberty, does sexual polarity coincide with the concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female.’”5 Boys retain the tendencies of this phase, whereas girls, after recognizing the inferiority of the clitoris, must mobilize other erogenous qualities in order to establish vaginal primacy and transfer clitoral eroticism to the vagina, a process which is finally completed only under favorable circumstances of development and only after puberty. According to the concurring views of numerous authors, the vagina plays no role as an erogenous zone during childhood; and in the analysis of women, one finds no indications of vaginal masturbation, except in cases of very early seduction to coituslike manipulation which causes the vagina to be discovered as a pleasure organ.

In his most recent investigation,6 Freud’s point of departure was the question of why girls carry an attachment to the mother into the genital phase, just as boys do, and then turn to their fathers. In boys the question is less complicated, since they do not need to change their original object but merely pass from a relatively passive attitude in the pregenital phase to an active one in the phallic phase.

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