The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel by Otto Fenichel

Author:Otto Fenichel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

Further Light upon the Pre-oedipal Phase in Girls*

I

THE present paper does not profess to put forward any new discoveries: it merely aims at making a somewhat more detailed clinical contribution to the discussion of Freud’s study of female sexuality.1

In recent times views have quite often been voiced to the effect that the discoveries of Freud and his pupils have now in all essentials elucidated the contents and mechanisms of the unconscious mental life that originates in childhood, and particularly of infantile sexuality and its vicissitudes. It is suggested that there is nothing much more to be found out about the problems of psychogenesis: the time has now come for psychoanalytic research to shift its main interest in some other direction—onto the task of shortening analytic treatment, for instance, or onto a more accurate study of the details of the patient’s characterological and conscious behavior.

To me views of this sort seem completely mistaken. It is no doubt true that the fundamental contents and mechanisms of the unconscious have been established and no longer require any fresh proof—such matters, I mean, as the development of infantile sexuality through the various stages of libidinal organization or the development of object relations through a period when the aim is incorporation up to the time of the oedipus complex, or again the history of that complex and the establishment of the superego. But if we seek to carry things further and describe every detail of these developmental processes, we soon discover what gaps there still are in our knowledge and what an immense amount still remains to be investigated. And, for an analyst, what can the “study of the details of characterological and conscious behavior” mean but the understanding of these details in their genesis as well? The only concession that might be made to the views I have mentioned would be what Freud has expressed in these words: “Everything that is to be seen upon the surface has already been exhausted; what remains has to be slowly and laboriously dragged up from the depths.”2 But many problems remain to be “slowly and laboriously” solved. In order to master them it will be necessary to make a comparative study of a great number of analyses to which more time and trouble have been devoted than to average analytic treatments.

I will begin by stating what seem to me to be the two factors which put the greatest difficulties in the way of a scientific investigation of the deepest levels of the apparatus of the mind and so too of the earliest period of life.

One of these factors is that the world of thought at those levels is quite alien to our own, so that it is quite impossible to reproduce them in words as one seems to perceive them in analysis. Let us consider, for instance, what a demand we are making on anyone who has not been able to convince himself of the fact in an analysis, if we ask him to believe that a

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