Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page B

of the differences between the sexes. A tone of agitated urgency, which was not present in his earlier work on the subject, begins to enter into Freud’s writings on gender distinctions.
    Putting his prolonged apology for his hasty conclusions behind him, Freud posts with all dexterity to positing some relationships between the anatomical differences between the sexes and what he proposes as the corre- sponding differences between the castration complex in males and females. From there he makes a further precipitous leap into suggesting a direct relationship between the anatomical differences (biological facts) and the social traits of masculinity and femininity (sociological or cultural influences). Or, as he put it in a paper written the year before, “Anatomy is destiny.” 34
    According to Freud’s 1925 version of the castration complex, which advances and consolidates the theory put forth in his 1924 paper, when the boy first catches sight of the girl’s genital region, he sees nothing there or disavows the nothing that he does see. It is only later when, for one reason or another, the threat of castration “has obtained a hold on him,” 35 that the early observation becomes a threat. After that, when the boy recollects his first sighting, “he must take seriously what he was previously able to laugh at or ignore.” 36 This combination of circumstances determine the boy’s later relations to women, “horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant con- tempt for her.” 37 Freud’s portrayals of the origins of the little boy’s castration anxiety and its potential effects on the adult male are plausible and, in fact, seem to correspond to the ways that real human beings might think about these matters. Many men who would otherwise be terrified of the female gen- itals triumph over this terror through their macho defense of a triumphant contempt for the female.
    Freud then turns his attention to “the mutilated creature.” And this is where the serious trouble begins. Until the writing of this essay, Freud had repre- sented infantile sexuality as if the female’s sexual development and even her Oedipus complex were mirrors of the little boy’s developmental trials. As Peter Gay remarks in his biography of Freud, “these were technical issues, a subject for research rather than polemics.” 38 But, Gay then raises a forceful criticism of Freud’s re-examination of the developmental schedules of boys and girls. When Freud now claimed “that the little girl is a failed boy, the grown woman a kind of castrated male,” he “put a match to inflammable material.” 39
    As Gay depicts the changes in Freud’s thinking, “his robust and caustic language” represented “a turn to the right, subverting his own idea,” 40 so congenial to the feminists of that time, that males and females have very similar psychological histories. “There was nothing in the climate of the 1920’s that would make him propound his controversial, at times scurrilous, views on women.” 41
    However, while Gay attributes this sea change to Freud’s attempt to puzzle through some difficulties in his new way of thinking about the Oedipus com- plex, I am, as I mentioned earlier, attributing these “caustic” and “scurrilous” attitudes toward women to the physical castrations that Freud had endured and continued to endure until the end of his life. No doubt, there is some measure of truth to Gay’s assumption about the theoretical issues motivating these changes, but his explanation is not sufficient to account for the destructive misogynism expressed in Freud’s later views on female anatomy.
    In comparing the little girl’s Oedipus complex to the little boy’s, Freud says, “The situation is quite different for a little girl, who does not turn to disavowal or wait for later experiences to confirm her perceptions and feelings.” 42 The little girl knows at once that she is castrated. When she first catches sight of the