Finding her own path
Autobiographies of psychoanalysts are important to read because much of the material that ends up in their theories come from rich experiences of complete and total failure. Like much of science, psychoanalysis often progresses through failure. By knowing what doesn’t work, one can provide advice with authority. “Although the years between 1912 and 1932 were marked by a number of professional achievements, Horney’s personal life was troubled. She enjoyed being a mother but was so preoccupied with her work that she had little time for her daughters. According to Harold Kelman, she had ‘basic feelings of ugliness, unfemininity, unlovability’ and was therefore deeply hurt by Oskar’s ‘interest in other more attractive and glamorous women.’ She consoled herself with affaires of her own, but they probably had the same desperate character that we saw toward the end of her diary. Her distress at her compulsive need for men and her inability to form and maintain satisfactory relationships is recorded in her essays on feminine psychology.”
Karen had the fortitude to make the most of her career despite hostility arising from the orthodox wing. She was given the cold shoulder, as many other theorists were, because of professional rivalry. You can’t take ideas wholesale from a profession and make tweaks and changes without it threatening careers. The pathway to contribution required an acceptance that one has to make detours. “Her moderate success did not fully reflect what she sensed to be her capabilities. She had begun to assert herself by taking issue with Freud and Abraham on the topic of feminine psychology, and after her separation from Oskar had published a steady stream of essays; but her work did not receive the attention for which she had hoped, and it made little impact on the psychoanalytic community. Margaret Mead reports that Horney ‘was very bitter about Freud’ because ‘he had never recognized her work on feminine psychology.’ Horney was well-regarded at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, but according to Abraham Kardiner, she was ‘not of the inner council’ in that bastion of classical theory.”
Horney’s strength was in her clear writings and seminars where it was simply her communicating to an audience or providing illuminating content for readers, but when in groups and meetings that were ripe for debate she would clam up instead. “The picture we receive from the few available accounts of Horney at this time is of a rather subdued person. The psychoanalyst G. H. Graeber, who knew her as a seminar instructor and supervising analyst in 1931-32, wrote to Jack Rubins that he could not ‘imagine that she could have had any enemies—very likely not even enviers or rivals among her colleagues.’ Although she was admired by her students, there was no ‘particular radiation. She did not appear very dynamic. I have never heard her laugh out loud or seen her get excited or even combative in discussions or debates.’ This is quite unlike the Karen Horney who wrote Self-Analysis. In Berlin, however, according to her colleague Edith Weigert, Horney was not ‘outgoing’ at professional meetings: ‘I think she more and more withdrew. I was at the meeting when Schulze-Hencke was excluded. He protested. Karen Horney never protested.’ Although Horney was quite assertive—even at times polemical—in her essays, Weigert felt that ‘in the society there were signs of reluctance, reservations on her part; she held back and sometimes I felt she was afraid of expressing herself, maybe of disagreeing. I don’t remember her ever doing it openly.’ There seems to have been a conflict in Horney between a desire to express her controversial ideas, as she did in her essays, and a fear of rejection—a wish to retain the approval of her colleagues that made her reticent at meetings of the society.”
The problem with Freud’s rejection of so many people was that the population of the rejected were much larger than the ones included. This allowed for breakaway factions to arise, but the challenge for Horney was to find a place where her explorations could be allowed. Each theorist wanted to start their own school to receive funding and acclaim, but then when you finally achieve something that needs to be protected, it’s easy to turn into another Freud. “In 1932 Horney accepted Franz Alexander’s invitation to become the founding associate director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, in part because she was intrigued by the possibility of expressing herself more freely. But she soon found herself at odds with Alexander and realized that she would not have the opportunity to follow her own ideas at the institute. Coming to the United States seems to have liberated her expansiveness, and she now found it intolerable to be in a subordinate position (especially to a man who had been her junior in Berlin) and to have to repress her thoughts and feelings.”
The key is always finding a platform where one can develop an audience and clientele free from interference. By working within other theorist’s platforms, Karen was always made small and gatekeepers prevent full expression. “Horney moved to New York in 1934, where her fortunes rose rapidly. She joined the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, despite opposition from Sandor Rado, and she was appointed to the faculty of the Washington-Baltimore Institute, where she lectured periodically. She began a rewarding relationship with Erich Fromm and became a member of the informal group of analysts known as the Zodiac Club formed by Harry Stack Sullivan in the mid-1930s. At the invitation of Clara Mayer, the future dean of the New School for Social Research, she began offering courses at the school that attracted large audiences and that led to her association with W. W. Norton. Through the New School, she also enlarged her circle of friends, which already included many well known refugees and social scientists. Between 1937 and 1942 she published three books that were widely discussed and gave her great prominence. As her importance grew, she became more assertive, more combative, and more charismatic. Although her unorthodox ideas led to her forced resignation from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Horney had really wanted an institute of her own, and in 1941 she established one.”
Female Castration Complex
From the standpoint of culture, Karen viewed the female castration complex as something that required more nuance beyond biology. She quoted the prevailing opinion at the time from Karl Abraham: “Many females, both children and adults, suffer either temporarily or permanently from the fact of their sex. The manifestations in the mental life of women that spring from the objection to being woman are traceable to their coveting a penis when they were little girls. The unwelcome idea of being fundamentally lacking in respect gives rise to passive castration fantasies, while active fantasies spring from a revengeful attitude against the favored male.”
A takeaway can be seen easily in that, the position you are in, if deemed advantageous by a culture and it’s rewarded solely to one group, it can make another group feel locked out “forever.” This guarantees resentment feelings will arise in the people excluded. Envy points to the identity that the person wants, precisely because of the perceived advantages.
In Karen’s practice, she had plenty of clients who could provide content and material for her to investigate the source of these discontents. “…Considerations that have gradually forced themselves upon me in the course of a practice extending over many years, amongst patients, the great majority of whom were women and in whom on the whole the castration complex was very marked…The castration complex in females is entirely centered in the penis-envy complex; in fact the term masculinity complex is used as practically synonymous. The first question which then presents itself is: How is it that we can observe this penis envy occurring as an almost invariable typical phenomenon, even when the subject has not a masculine way of life, where there is no favored brother to make envy of this sort comprehensible and where no ‘accidental disasters’ in the woman’s experience have caused the masculine role to seem the more desirable?”
In one area of biology, boys and men are expected to be more exhibitionistic with masturbation, and so even this small affordance can trigger envy. “He forbids her to do that and yet does it himself five or six times a day…Girls have a very special difficulty in overcoming masturbation because they feel that they are unjustly forbidden something that boys are allowed to do on account of their different bodily formation…Men have greater freedom in their sexual life, is really based upon actual experiences to that effect in early childhood…The little girl’s sense of inferiority is (as Abraham has also pointed out in one passage) by no means primary. But it seems to her that, in comparison with boys, she is subject to restrictions as regards the possibility of gratifying certain instinct-components that are of the greatest importance in the pregenital period. Indeed, I think I would put the matter even more accurately if I said that as an actual fact, from the point of view of a child at this stage of development, little girls are at a disadvantage compared with boys in respect of certain possibilities of gratification. For unless we are quite clear about the reality of this disadvantage we shall not understand that penis envy is an almost inevitable phenomenon in the life of female children, and one that cannot but complicate female development.”
There’s also a delay in sexual value where attention is finally given more exclusively to sex roles that are the bedrock of the nuclear family. Women always fear unwanted pregnancy and so sexual entertainment always involves a certain amount of risk. This means that all the time up until marriage, the attention in culture was mainly on men trying to “score” with women, and they had to parade their career success as a form of confidence and attractiveness in competition. “We know that at this stage there are two possible ways in which a girl may overcome the penis envy complex without detriment to herself. She may pass from the autoerotic narcissistic desire for the penis to the woman’s desire for the man (or the father), precisely in virtue of her identification of herself with her mother; or to the material desire for a child (by the father). With regard to the subsequent love life of healthy as well as abnormal women, it is illuminating to reflect that (even in the most favorable instances) the origin, or at any rate one origin, of either attitude was narcissistic in character and of the nature of a desire for possession.”
Karen also identified the “to be or to have” conundrum where children in the Oedipus Complex don’t know which parent to favor in their imitations and identity. Until those unconscious conflicts were brought into awareness, Karen’s patients continued in the same pattern. “Her coveting of the penis (her brother’s) and her violent anger against him as the intruder who had ousted her from her position of only child, when once revealed by analysis, entered consciousness heavily charged with affect. The envy was, moreover, accompanied by all the manifestations that we are accustomed to trace to it: first and foremost the attitude of revenge against men, with very intense castration fantasies; repudiation of feminine tasks and functions, especially that of pregnancy; and further, a strong unconscious homosexual tendency. It was only when the analysis penetrated into deeper strata under the greatest resistance imaginable that it became evident that the source of the penis envy was her envy on account of the child that her mother and not she had received from her father, whereupon by a process of displacement the penis had become the object of envy in place of the child…It was easy to prove that her desire to be a man was by no means to be understood in a general sense, but that the real meaning of her claims was to act her father’s part. Thus she adopted the same profession as her father, and after his death her attitude to her mother was that of a husband who makes demands upon his wife and issues orders. Once when a noisy [belch] escaped her she could not help thinking with satisfaction: ‘Just like Papa.’ Yet she did not reach the point of a completely homosexual object choice: the development of the object [craving] seemed rather to be altogether disturbed, and the result was an obvious regression to an autoerotic narcissistic stage. To sum up: displacement of the envy that had reference to children on to the brother and his penis, identification with the father and regression to a pregenital phase all operated in the same direction—to stir up a powerful penis envy, which then remained in the foreground and seemed to dominate the whole picture.”
It appears that attempts to imitate masculine or feminine energies are based on skill level and being able to develop to the genital level where sexual orientation is overt, or the child grows up and has underdeveloped and only partial anal or oral proclivities, and also not fully formed in a sexual orientation. This envy is based on recognizing something as advantageous in the sex role and wanting to invest considerable energy to bridge that gap between oneself and the preferred identity. Constitutionality probably then accounts for the strength of feelings associated with the desired identity and the motivation to keep developing masculine or feminine skills to an advanced level, and then you can imagine that same sex attractions are more possible when the signal transmitted to the public is predominantly masculine or feminine and received without mistake. “Such an oscillation between father and mother is surely nothing peculiar. On the contrary, it is to be seen in every child, and we know that, according to Freud, the [craving] of each one of us oscillates throughout life between male and female objects…What happens is that a phase of identification with the mother gives way to a very large extent to one of identification with the father, and at the same time there is regression to a pregenital stage. This process of identification with the father I believe to be one root of the castration complex in women…We can see that penis envy by no means precludes a deep and wholly womanly love attachment to the father and that it is only when this relation comes to grief over the Oedipus complex (exactly as in the corresponding male neuroses) that the envy leads to a revulsion from the subject’s own sexual role.”
You can then extrapolate this to a therapy to challenge the envy and recognize anything undervalued in the sex role of birth. If the patient cannot muster interest in developing skills culturally attributed to a biological sex role, then it’s more likely that a person will prefer an alternative lifestyle that cannot easily be slotted into a family system. See Anna Freud’s professional relationships as an example where the sex is not overt or Harry Stack Sullivan’s work that supported homosexuals where they could exist in community sanctuaries and live more openly without the fear of punishment.
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v6620s4-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-2.html
Object Relations: Harry Stack Sullivan: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-harry-stack-sullivan/
The Flight From Womanhood
After researching the female perspective of childhood, Karen moved to adult concerns where women were disappointed with their roles and the expectations men put on them. These expectations for Karen meant that the worldview would be considered masculine, partly because it was considered objective and scientific, but all the while hiding subjective views of women based on their utility to men. “Supposing that we describe these things, viewed as absolute ideas, by the single word ‘objective,’ we then find that in the history of our race the equation objective = masculine is a valid one…It is inevitable that the man’s position of advantage should cause objective validity to be attributed to his subjective, affective relations to the woman, and according to Delius Rudolf the psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men.”
Forced adaptation to the wishes of men would confuse women as to their authentic desires and bring inner conflict. Though, one has to put aside the sacrifices men put throughout history to protect their families and all the accidents, death and dismemberment situations that gave rise for the need for life insurance. “An additional and very important factor in the situation is that women have adapted themselves to the wishes of men and felt as if their adaptation were their true nature. That is, they see or saw themselves in the way that their men’s wishes demanded of them; unconsciously they yielded to the suggestion of masculine thought. If we are clear about the extent to which all our being, thinking, and doing conform to these masculine standards, we can see how difficult it is for the individual man and also for the individual woman really to shake off this mode of thought…Georg Simmel says in this connection that ‘the greater importance attaching to the male sociologically is probably due to his position of superior strength,’ and that historically the relation of the sexes may be crudely described as that of master and slave. Here, as always, it is ‘one of the privileges of the master that he has not constantly to think that he is master, while the position of the slave is such that he can never forget it.'”
Once institutionalized, women were not given the chance to excel in male arenas and the arrogant assumption that many men asserted was that it was biological rather than simply the economic separation of duties, like specializing as a provider or caregiver. A modern example, would be in an audience listening to a successful artist talk about their past successes and works while announcing their autobiography. The desire for men to make a significant mark on the world, to create a lucrative platform, exists in women as well. “There is one further consideration. Owing to the hitherto purely masculine character of our civilization, it has been much harder for women to achieve any sublimation that would really satisfy their nature, for all the ordinary professions have been filled by men. This again must have exercised an influence upon women’s feelings of inferiority, for naturally they could not accomplish the same as men in these masculine professions and so it appeared that there was a basis in fact for their inferiority. It seems to me impossible to judge to how great a degree the unconscious motives for the flight from womanhood are reinforced by the actual social subordination of women.”
The advantage men have is their flexibility in taking on hobbies and interests that satisfy their feminine sides, but femininity in a man was considered weakness back then so their outward profession was expected to be competitive. Even if they became a painter, it was expected that their work would be rated by how masterful the paintings were. “The same factors must have quite a different effect on the man’s development. On the one hand they lead to a much stronger repression of his feminine wishes, in that these bear the stigma of inferiority; on the other hand it is far easier for him successfully to sublimate them.”
Like in Pt. 2, desire is partial and most people tend to look at the short-term pleasure but ignore the pain. We may escape from one role only to find drawbacks in other roles. For example, for the women who fear the pain of childbirth, escaping to a masculine role brings masculine problems of competition in the workforce, threats to survival and castration humiliation. “The fiction of maleness enabled the girl to escape from the female role now burdened with guilt and anxiety. It is true that this attempt to deviate from her own line to that of the male inevitably brings about a sense of inferiority, for the girl begins to measure herself by pretensions and values that are foreign to her specific biological nature and confronted with which she cannot but feel herself inadequate.”
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvsvj-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-1.html
Even if some women were trying to escape womanhood, the sexual act still involves the womb, via ownership of the womb and stewardship of a new generation, or penetration and insemination of the womb. The womb is also a symbol of heaven where there are no cares or worries for the fetus that enjoys peaceful, but passive gratification. “The influence of the man’s point of view in the conception of motherhood is most clearly revealed in Ferenczi’s extremely brilliant genital theory. His view is that the real incitement to coitus, its true, ultimate meaning for both sexes, is to be sought in the desire to return to the mother’s womb. During a period of contest man acquired the privilege of really penetrating once more, by means of his genital organ, into a uterus. The woman, who was formerly in the subordinate position, was obliged to adapt her organization to this organic situation and was provided with certain compensations. She had to ‘content herself’ with substitutes in the nature of fantasy and above all with harboring the child, whose bliss she shares. At the most, it is only in the act of birth that she perhaps has potentialities of pleasure denied to the man.”
In analyzing men, Karen found that deep down there were unspoken desires to conversely be in the woman’s position, because again, if there’s some advantage somewhere, the unconscious will start to glue on it with imitation. “But from the biological point of view woman has in motherhood, or in the capacity for motherhood, a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority. This is most clearly reflected in the unconscious of the male psyche in the boy’s intense envy of motherhood. We are familiar with this envy as such, but it has hardly received due consideration as a dynamic factor. When one begins, as I did, to analyze men only after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of the breasts and of the act of suckling.”
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v6b5odm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-3.html
The reality is that each role, like being the provider or the nurturer, they all have tradeoffs. Fighting in wars, sacrificing self-development, etc. It’s the fear of missing out once again. It’s always good to ask, “how does the fear of missing out influence my choices? Is it possible that in some situations, missing out would actually be better?” Overvaluation leads to envy of an identity and world that appears more stimulating, purposeful, relaxing, and superior to the current experience. The way out is to appreciate what is undervalued in one’s role. “In the light of this impression derived from analysis, one must naturally inquire whether an unconscious masculine tendency to depreciation is not expressing itself intellectually in the above mentioned view of motherhood. This depreciation would run as follows: In reality women do simply desire the penis; when all is said and done motherhood is only a burden that makes the struggle for existence harder, and men may be glad that they have not to bear it. Bisexuality means not only that everyone has traits of both sexes, but also that it is not possible to content ourselves with one sex role. We need only look at the ancient images of gods with breasts and phalluses, which give a form to these bisexual desires—desires which are by no means limited to women. We can find equally intense wishes in the unconscious fantasies of men concerning motherhood; their ‘birthing envy’ not only manifests itself in neurotic symptoms but also gives rise to their obviously very powerful drive for cultural achievement.”
Inhibited Femininity
When people are working in a role without a feeling of choice, including traditional roles, actions may be taken towards success, but not without resistance. Karen found that this resistance manifests in bodily symptoms. “In other cases the difficulty lies in the woman’s attitude toward motherhood. In some instances pregnancy is rejected outright—with some form of rationalization being given. In others, miscarriages occur without demonstrable organic conditions. In still others we encounter those numerous well-known complaints of pregnancy. Disturbances such as neurotic anxiety or functional weakness of labor may set in during delivery. In other women, nursing becomes difficult, from the extremes of complete failure of breast feeding to nervous exhaustion. Or we may not find the proper motherly attitude toward the child. We may see instead those irritated or overanxious mothers who cannot give the child real warmth and are inclined to leave him with a governess…Something similar often happens regarding the woman’s household chores. Either housework is overrated and turned into a torture for the family, or it tires her excessively, just as every task that is done unwillingly becomes a strain…Even where all these disturbances are absent, one relationship will regularly be impaired or incomplete—namely, the attitude toward the male.”
These complaints are rarely communicated openly and so an analysis can be a safe place to bring them out, especially deep-seeded grievances. “…At a deeper level is another clearly discernible motivation—a more or less intensive wish for, or fantasies of, masculinity. I want to emphasize that we are here already within the realm of the unconscious. Although such wishes can be partially conscious, the woman is generally unconscious of their extent and deeper instinctive motivation…To the extent that the envy of the male is in the foreground, these wishes express themselves in resentment against the male, in an inner bitterness against the male as the privileged one…Furthermore, such an unconscious attitude of envy renders the woman blind to her own virtues. Even motherhood appears only as a burden to her. Everything is measured against the masculine—that is, by a yardstick intrinsically alien to her—and therefore she easily perceives herself as insufficient. Thus we find nowadays a considerable degree of uncertainty even in gifted women whose achievements are both positive and recognized. This arises from the depth of their masculinity complex and may express itself in excessive sensitivity to criticism or in timidity.”
Males being culturally favored can also inculcate an anger against that culture with a demand for reparations. “The feeling of having been basically damaged and discriminated against by fate, can also result in unconscious claims against life for compensation because of these wrongs done her. It is consistent with the origin of these claims that they can never actually be satisfied. One is accustomed to explain the picture of the perpetually demanding, perpetually discontented woman as deriving from general sexual dissatisfaction. But deeper insights clearly demonstrate that the dissatisfaction can already be a consequence of the masculinity complex. It is easily understandable, as well as proven by experience, that strong unconscious claims for masculinity are unfavorable to a feminine attitude. Because of their inner logic these claims must lead to frigidity, if the male is not rejected altogether as a sex partner. Frigidity, in turn, is likely to intensify the above-mentioned inferiority feelings, since at a deeper level it unerringly is experienced as an incapacity for love. Often this is in complete opposition to the conscious moral evaluation of frigidity as a manifestation of decency or chastity. In turn, this unerring unconscious feeling of a lack in the sexual sphere leads easily to a neurotically reinforced jealousy of other women.”
Psychosomatic results can happen when extreme wishes and hopes about one’s sex lead to biological self-hatred. Inner conflict has an effect on health. “The dreams and symptoms of many women clearly demonstrate that basically they have not come to terms with their femininity. On the contrary, in their unconscious fantasy lives they have maintained the fiction of having actually been created as males. They believe that through some influences they have been mutilated, injured, or wounded. In keeping with such fantasies, the female genital is conceived of as a sick and damaged organ, a concept that later can be confirmed and activated again and again through the evidence of menstruation—their conscious and better knowledge notwithstanding. The connection with unconscious fantasies of such a nature can easily lead to the above-mentioned menstrual difficulties, as well as to pains during sexual intercourse, and to gynecological difficulties…Such a primitive attitude toward the physical strikes us adult Europeans as strange. We see, however, that other groups who think more naïvely and thus less repressedly in sexual matters, quite openly practice cults involving worship of the physical emblems of sexuality, especially the phallus, to which they attribute divine rank and miraculous power. The pattern of thought underlying these phallic cults is in fact so closely related to a child’s that it is clearly intelligible to anyone familiar with the child’s way of being. Conversely, it can help us to better understand the child’s world.”
Some of these psychosomatic consequences were monitored by analysts at the time of Karen Horney:
- Hypochondria.
- Stress was suspected to trigger something that was constitutionally dormant.
- Repression of sexuality or masturbation has different consequences like reaction formations to appear opposite to one’s desires and there are possible obsessive behaviors related to tics, bad habits, or negative views about the woman’s role.
The wildness of beliefs found in free association often come from infantile wishes that haven’t been brought to consciousness enough for the adult mind to reflect on and discard. Before psychoanalysis, not only were these contents ignored, but they were expected to be repressed forever. “…One can often identify and directly observe a childhood stage, during which little girls do in fact envy boys their genitals. This is a well-established finding that can easily be checked by direct observation. Analytic interpretations, which after all are subjective, have added nothing to these observations, and yet even at the point of direct confirmation one meets with firm disbelief. Wherever critics cannot dispute the fact that children may express such ideas, they attempt at the least to deny their developmental significance. They state that such a wish or even envy may be observable in some girls, but that it means no more than the envy similar to that shown for another child’s toys or sweets.”
For women who have accepted their sex and biological contribution, there is much less inner conflict because their goal sexually has now become complimentary to the man. “…One has to realize that the attitude of penis envy is a narcissistic one, being directed toward one’s own ego and not toward the object. In the case of a favorable feminine development, this narcissistic penis envy becomes almost completely submerged in the object-[craving] desire for a man and for a child. This experience fits in well with the observation that women who rest securely in their femininity show no traces worth mentioning of the above expressions of masculinity claims.”
Parental cultural attitudes about the value of men and women can be seen when one is more favored than another, often based on property ownership and inheritance etc. Karen also agreed with Freud that the sex act could appear like violence against women giving distorted views as to the value of the mother. This dualism between being in the position of power where one can savor as a choice or being in a weakened position where savoring is restricted, these forbiddances that block access to what is advantageous simply signal that the gatekeeping is not about public safety but based on jealousy. Desire then intensifies. “During this phase, which reaches its peak between the third and fifth year of life, different factors may enter, causing the girl to shrink back from her female role. Gross favoritism of a brother, for instance, can often contribute a great deal toward establishing strong masculinity wishes in the little girl. Early sexual observations have a still more lasting influence in this direction. This is particularly true in a milieu where sexual matters are otherwise concealed from the child, so that they take on, just by this very contrast, the character of the uncanny and the forbidden. Sexual intercourse by the parents, so frequently observed during the first years of childhood, is typically conceived of by the child as the mother’s being raped, injured, wounded, or made ill. Observation of traces of the mother’s menstrual blood reinforce the child’s opinion. Accidental impressions, like real brutality on the part of the father and sickness of the mother may increase in the child the notion that the woman’s position is precarious and one of danger.”
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 5: https://rumble.com/v6pzkqo-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-5.html
Why these problems are considered narcissistic for Karen has to do with the essential addiction to an ideal self-image, an ego-ideal, contra to the impulses of the female body. Therapeutic healing threatens the possibility of going into withdrawal symptoms and resistances, because the addiction wants to continue those idealistic daydreams, even if it means a mind-body connection where the mind continues to attack the hated biological fate. “Once these unconscious masculinity claims have taken hold, the woman has fallen into a fatal, vicious circle. Whereas she originally had fled from the female role into the fiction of the male one, the latter, once established, contributes in turn to her rejection of the female role even further and now with an added tinge of the contemptible. A woman who has built her life on such unconscious pretenses is basically endangered from two sides: by her masculinity wishes on the one hand, since they shake her feeling of self, and by her repressed femininity on the other, in that some experience inevitably reminds her of her feminine role.”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Like men who have trouble with the Madonna vs. Whore splitting of their love interests, there are a few women that also have the same split towards men, which is cleaved between familial love vs. intense attraction. “For some women the sexual experience has to occur within an atmosphere of the forbidden, for others it has to be accompanied by the suffering of some violence, and in still others it is only possible if all emotional involvement is excluded. In these last instances women may be frigid with a beloved man, and yet capable of complete physical surrender to a man who is merely sensually desired, but unloved…The split into sensual and romantic components of the love life, which we find only occasionally in women, seems to be about as frequent in educated men as frigidity is in women. Thus, on the one hand, man searches for his life’s companion and friend who is close to him spiritually, but toward whom his sensuousness is inhibited, and who, deep down, he expects will reciprocate with a similar attitude. The effect on the woman is clear; it can very easily lead to frigidity, even if the inhibitions she has brought with her from her own development are not insurmountable. On the other hand, such a man will search for a woman, with whom he can have sexual relations only, a trend he manifests most clearly in his relationships with prostitutes. The repercussion of this attitude upon the woman, however, must also result in frigidity. Since in women the emotional life is, as a rule, much more closely and uniformly connected with sexuality, she cannot give herself completely when she does not love or is not loved.”
Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html
Case Studies: The ‘Wolfman’ (2/3) – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gug9n-case-studies-the-wolf-man-23-freud-and-beyond.html
There are actual situations of incest beyond the emotional kind and this can appear in dreams and free association. “In analysis of such cases, we hear over and over that there was a fear of the father, and dreams most clearly show the sexual basis of this fear…In dreams the father may appear as a dog or lion that wants to bite the child, with the dreamer wondering why her mother so casually lets him run around loose. In one case of agoraphobia, the girl dreamed that her father was Death pursuing her and trying to get hold of her. Here, as often happens, death and man, dying and the sex act are unconsciously equated. In this case, the girl had an intense relationship with her father; she was his favorite, and even as a grown girl she was very jealous of her mother and of any girlfriend who gave her father a friendly look. At the same time, she felt fearful and embarrassed about being alone with her father. Her agoraphobia clearly had the meaning, Mother must not leave me alone with my father.”
Patricia Kopatchinskaja – Death and the Maiden – Schubert – The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra: https://youtu.be/gsooaIFEBg8?si=XhacfyzcYrjR3zW7
Again the partition of desire, where aspects of the masculine or feminine were admired or feared, led to switching roles under the influence of benefits that would accrue by being a man and the fear of being abused if remaining as a woman. To avoid being suffocated by the whole tired presence of the father, it was logical to then take his place instead, especially when inspired by his admired aspects that allowed him access to the more interesting wider world. “The real driving force behind the masculinity complex is a fear of female experience, which is increased by an intense relationship with the father. Under the pressure of this fear, the girl takes refuge in a fictitious male role…A pretty girl with exquisite feminine traits, she fell ill during her first menstruation, and she showed hostility and fear toward men who tried to approach her. She once said herself, ‘If someone doesn’t look like my father, I don’t like him, and if he does look like him, pretty soon he becomes disgusting.’ She volunteered this without any prompting. This patient was very mistrustful and not at all suggestible. Her dreams revealed her genital anxiety in a transparent symbolism. For instance, burglars break into the house, threaten her, and steal or destroy something. She took refuge in masculinity fantasies and clung to them pathologically. These fantasies were unconscious, but the change in sex roles clearly manifested itself in her way of life. She went into her father’s firm and took over when he became ill and was unable to work, thus taking her father’s place in reality.”
Feminine Psychology – Karen Horney: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393310801/
The Unknown Karen Horney – Karen Horney, Bernard J. Paris: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300080421/
Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding – Professor Bernard J. Paris: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300059564/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/