Why Freud Got It Wrong

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Martin van Creveld

[Originally posted on April 23, 2014. Here reposted because, among God knows how many censors busily censoring every possible source of information, it seems more relevant than ever].

Freud got it wrong. The strongest drive that rules the species of homo which has the impudence to call itself sapiens is not sex. It is the urge to shut up those with whom one disagrees. Here are some examples, all taken from supposedly liberal, supposedly democratic, countries. In Australia, the government tried to impose draconian restrictions on its citizen’s access to various kinds of material on the Net. It was even been polite enough to ask the US for its approval (approval, thank goodness, was not given). In Canada, a newspaper editor who republished those famous Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was summoned to explain himself before a government committee.

But it is not only the left which tries to dictate to people how to think. In France under Chirac and Sarkozy, teachers and professors who believe that French colonialism was an evil thing and did not help those who were subject to it in their march towards liberté, égalité and and fraternité were threatened with sanctions. In Britain, attempts were made to prevent a Dutch member of parliament who believes that the Koran is evil from entering the country. No surprise, that; in recent years, each time an Arab or Islamist has farted the British have wetted their pants.

In Germany some years ago, the geniuses at the Bundesministerium for Family and Youth tried to ban a children’s book. The author was Michael Schmidt-Salomon; the title, Where Can I find the Way to God, Please? Asked the Little Piglet. It attacked bishops, kadis and rabbis, presenting them all as rogues out to swindle people. If those people rejected the confidence trick, violence might ensue. On this occasion the High Constitutional Court, to its credit, denied the Ministry’s request.

And how about the US? In the self-proclaimed “land of the free” the situation is no better than anywhere else. In the media, in political life, even in sports and entertainment, anyone who utters a word that could possibly be constructed or mis-constructed as “racist” or “sexist” risks losing everything. The redoubtable Ann Coulter, who had seven conservatively-oriented books on the New York Times best seller list, has even engaged on a regular witch-hunt against what she pleases to call “liberal” professors. She encourages students to spy on them, exposes their alleged thoughtcrimes, and demands that they be fired; all while calling them by their names.

And how did the universities react to the assault? For centuries past, an essential part of their mission has been to defend freedom of thought. Yet in- and out of the US most universities, coming under the steamroller of political correctness, have long started sawing off the branch on which they sit. For daring to suggest that, in his view and as much research indicates, women may not have the same innate ability at mathematics as men, do, Larry Summers, president of Harvard University and a former secretary of the treasury under Clinton, lost his job.

As Voltaire once said, “I do not agree with a word you utter; but I will fight to the death for you right to do so.” As he also said, most philosophers are cowards. As Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate in their book, The Shadow University, showed, many American universities regularly open the academic year by extensively briefing students on what they are, and are not, allowed to say. Those who, advertently or not, overstep the guidelines are persecuted and prosecuted. Often this is done in complete violation of the most basic rules that are supposed to govern a fair trial. So bad have things become that there now exist several organizations whose sole mission in life is to defend students’—and professors’—constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech against the universities where they study or teach.

Restrictions on freedom of thought and speech are, of course, nothing new. During most of history they were imposed either by dictatorial governments or by priests who, often working hand in hand with those governments, did not want anybody to question the hold religion gave them over society. For two centuries after the American and French Revolutions the West, to the extent that it did not turn either Communist or Fascist, took justified pride in the fact that it had done away with censorship and cast off most of those restraints. It was even thought, with very good reason, that this freedom was one of the cardinal factors that made the West as successful as it was.

No longer. What distinguishes the last two decades from most of their predecessors is the fact that much of the pressure in this direction is exerted in countries that are supposedly democratic and free. It seems to come not from above but from below, i.e. society itself. Nowadays in most “advanced” countries whenever anybody says or writes anything, there is certain to be somebody else around who finds his words “inappropriate” or “offensive.” To return to America’s universities, in many of them things have now reached the point where only blacks may write dissertations about blacks, gays about gays, lesbians about lesbians, and so on. Objectivity, or at any rate the attempt to reach it, has been thrown overboard. Yet where objectivity is lacking any attempt to understand also necessarily comes to an end. Whenever the alleged offender is at all prominent, a demand for an apology is certain to follow. Often the apology itself is but a cover for greed as “compensation” is demanded and mandated. There has even come into being an entire class of lawyers who, cruising the law, spend their time looking for cases of this kind.

Many of the offenses against freedom of speech are committed in the name of minors. Supposedly they must be isolated from all kinds of “false” ideas. For example, that God does not exist; or that sex before marriage is not morally wrong; or that their teachers may sometimes mislead them; or whatever. Now radio is called the villain, now TV. Now video games are to blame, now the Net. Those in charge of these technical instruments and their contents ought to be restrained, silenced, and punished if necessary. Not that there is anything new in this. The need to “protect” the young has often been used to justify some of the worst crimes of all; look at the execution of Socrates 2,412 years ago.

Perhaps worst of all, little if any of this is written into positive law. Since nobody knows what is and is not permitted, those who still dare engage in non-mainstream discourse are forced to watch their every step. What remains tends to become repetitive and tepid. The end result is the endless repetition of meaningless clichés, what George Orwell in 1984 called duckspeak. Perhaps authoritarian figures such as Russia’s Putin have got it right after all. With them, at any rate, one knows where one stands.

Its Truth is Marching On

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Martin van Creveld

In last week’s post I mentioned PE (penis envy) as one of the most powerful drives that has always made the world go round and will presumably continue to do so until the lights go out. And not for the first time either. Each time I do so, I am sure to get some readers’ reactions. They tell me that modern brain science has not succeeded in identifying any such thing (this is analogues to saying that, since the scientific community has been unable to reproduce God’s results, the world does not exist). That Freud was an impostor most of whose opus, including not just PE but a great many other concepts he used in his decades-long attempt to understand how the human mind works, has been deservedly relegated to history’s dustbin. That he used to “molest” his helpless female patients (the worst thing that can be said about any man). And so on, and so on.

Such being the case, I’ve decided to post a slightly updated version of a post I posted for the first time on 16 June 2016. Hopefully it will tell readers what PE is and why I keep my belief in it; in other words, why its truth keeps marching on.

Any comments, welcome.

PE? PE!

The other day, walking through the Hebrew University library looking for something interesting to read, my eye hit a tome with the grand-sounding title, The Oxford Companion to the Mind. I opened it; a thousand pages. Edited by one Richard L. Gregory, CBE, MA (Cantab), DSC, LLD, FRS, and published (second edition), in 2004. The volume differs from the better known Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in that it is more than just a list of all kinds of symptoms, real and imaginary. Instead it is a wide-ranging encyclopedia. With alphabetically arranged articles about everything from the way the ancient Egyptians understood the mind to something called the halo effect.

How wonderful, I thought. An opportunity to refresh my understanding of a phenomenon which, as readers know, I have long been interested in: PE (penis envy). Full of anticipation, I turned the pages. What a disappointment! PE is just not there. Yok, as we Israelis, using a Turkish word, say.

Yet that is strange. It is not as if the volume ignores Freud and psychoanalysis. To the contrary, both merit fairly hefty articles. PE apart, Freudian and Freudian-derived ideas do figure in the book. In considerable numbers, what is more. Among them are the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, the inferiority complex, and many more.
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I decided to check. On Google.com PE has 1,270,000 hits; not a bad following for an idea that is supposed to be purely a figment of one man’s imagination (he himself has 40,400,000, no less). PE has 19,200, the Oedipus Complex 875,000, the Electra Complex (originally introduced by Carl Gustav Jung) 302,000, “inferiority complex” 8,740,000, and “castration anxiety” 162,000. The corresponding figures for Google.scholar are 52,500, 4,550, 2,600 30,900, and 22,300 respectively. On Ngram as of the year 2019, PE figured far more often than “inferiority complex,” “Oedipus Complex,” “Electra Complex,” and “castration anxiety.” All in all, PE seems to put on quite a respectable showing. Yet whereas the other four do have entries in the aforesaid Companion, PE does not.

What is going on here? Some claim that there is no way to prove that PE exists. That may be so; however, the same applies to all the rest. After all the methodology, which consists essentially of listening to patients in a room called a clinic that may or may not contain a couch, is always the same. So I decided to do a little historical research.

Before we delve into the topic itself, though, it is important to note that Freud, like many male gurus throughout history, attracted female patients and students as a lamp attracts moths. No wonder, that, since he valued them and treated them like daughters. It was to one of these women, a Viennese society lady, that Freud owed his professorship, a position he, being Jewish, might not have got without her help. To another, Marie Bonaparte, he owed his life. In 1938 it was she who paid off the Nazis to allow him and his family to leave Austria. Thus any idea that Freud hated women, or did not value them, or looked down on them, is so absurd that only sexually frustrated, half-crazed, present-day feminists can entertain it.

Freud first postulated the existence of PE in a contribution to the nature of sexuality he published in 1904. Two decades later, in 1925, it became the pillar of a 1925 paper he wrote named, Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds (“some psychological consequences of the anatomical differences between the sexes;” note the characteristically modest way of announcing a new idea). From this point on it often came up in his famous Wednesday evening seminars where he and his disciples, both male and female, discussed psychoanalysis. Both the men and the women tended to be highly intelligent and quite a few of them later attained fame in their own right. Certainly none was a cretin who simply allowed Freud to overrun him or her.

And how did the women in the company take to the concept? One of the most important, Freud’s own daughter Anna, sidestepped the problem altogether. The rest were divided. On one side of the debate was Karen Horney. Praised by subsequent feminists for having “a mind of her own,” she did not deny the existence of PE. Indeed she called Freud’s discovery of it “momentous.” However, following a then famous sociologist by the name of Georg Simmel, she argued that women envied men their penises not because their biology made them to but because the penis stood as a symbol for the advantages society conferred on men; in other words, PE, and what she called “the flight from womanhood,” was a consequence, not a cause. For expressing this view, Horney ended up by being thrown out of the New York psychoanalytical society.

Several other female members of Freud’s circle disagreed. One was Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, said to be the most biologically-reductionist among all his followers. Another was Jeanne Lampl de Groot. To her, “the absence of a penis could not be regarded as a matter of secondary and trifling significance for the little girl.” Rather, PE was “a central point [from which] the development into normal femininity begins.” “Woman’s wish for a penis is the consequence of a biological datum that underlies her psychic reaction of feeling inferior and is rock bottom.”

More important than either of those was Helene Deutsch. Good-looking, capable and extremely hard working, her Psychology of Women (1944) was considered authoritative for decades on end, Deutsch was one of the first Austrian women to receive a medical degree. She considered herself, with good reason, as “a leader in female emancipation.” Yet this did not prevent her from explaining that the clitoris was “an inadequate substitute” for a penis. As late as 2018, in an article originally published in 1964, a female psychotherapist by the name of Maria Torok wrote that “in every woman’s analysis there is inevitably a period in which appears a feeling of envy and covetousness for both the male sex organ and its symbolic equivalents.” Having made listening to women her profession, she should know.

Back to Freud. Then as today, finding out whether we humans are shaped by nature or nurture was a difficult, very often impossible, enterprise. Perhaps that is why Freud, who sometimes hesitated to tread where his followers romped, never voiced his opinion on the matter. Instead he contended himself with the famous question, “what does woman want?”

I too will leave the question open. I do, however, want to provide some examples of what, in my view, PE is. When women discard skirts and put on trousers, then that is PE. When some women complain (as has in fact happened!) that their daughters are not being diagnosed with ADHD as often as boys are, then that is PE. When women refuse to have children so they can have a career as men do, then that is PE. When women want to follow men to Afghanistan and Iraq so they can get themselves shot to pieces for some obscure cause no one understands, then that too is PE.

When some Jewish Israeli women defy a court order and dance with a Torah scroll at the Wailing Wall as Jewish men have been doing for ages, then that is PE. When famous feminist Betty Friedan says she wants to play in men’s “ballfield,” then that is PE. When feminist writer Jean Sinoda Bohlen says she wants to achieve men’s “potency,” then that is PE. When renowned feminist Naomi Wolf says she wants to see more ads with objects sticking out of “women’s [emphasis in the original] groins,” then that is PE doubled, tripled, and squared. In these and countless other cases, one can only conclude that women do in fact crave “the obvious ‘extra’ that [men] have” (Nancy Friday).

Always focusing on rights, never on duties. Always imagining that men have it better and trying to imitate them. Hardy ever coming up with something really new: not the telescope, not the microscope, not gravity, not the steam engine, not the computer (all the best-known female worker in the field, Ada Lovelace, did was to translate the article of an Italian engineering officer, Luigi Menabrea, and provide it with notes). To quote my wife, Dvora, perhaps the real reason why PE is left unmentioned in the Companion is because it is not a disease.

It is, rather, a normal state of mind.

Dear Doctor Freud

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Martin van Creveld

Dear Doctor Freud:

I hope this letter reaches you, wherever you may be. Also that you are feeling well and that your circumstances are sufficiently comfortable to enable you to read it, in case you feel like doing so.

Please allow me to say a few words a bout myself. I was born in 1946, just seven years after your death. Like you, I am a secular-minded Jew. Unlike you, I have spent practically all my life in Israel,a country which, in your day, did not yet exist. By profession I am a historian. You and I have something in common: both of us have spent much o four lives trying to understand how individuals and societies function. Albeit we have approached the problem from different angles, in different ways, and using different methodologies.

Originally I was a military historian (a field,incidentally, that was taught in very few, if any, universities in our time). But over the last twenty years I have taken a strong interest in feminism and women’s history; after all, starting at least as far back as the Odyssey, Mars and Venus have always got along quite nicely. I would go so far as to argue that, without women to support warriors and admire them and look after them and mourn them and open their arms to them after their return from the battlefield,there would have been no war. After all, what is the point?

It was against this background that I came across your famous question, “was will das Weib,” what does a woman want. It bothered me, as it did you. For whatever it may be worth, I want to provide you with my own private attempt to answer it.

First, women want to love and be loved. As well as respected, admired, and, yes, even worshiped. Don’t we all?

Second, women want to be treated equally with men. In other words, to have the kind of relationship with them that will enable people of both sexes to work in harmony towards a common goal; including, above all, raising a family and leading the good life. At the same time, though, they want to be treated as women. Meaning, with the kind of special consideration they believe, in my opinion rightly, that the fact that they are the mothers of the race as well as their relative physical vulnerability entitles them to.

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Third, women want a man to defend them. When everything is said and done, only men can protect a woman against other men.Partly that is because men are physically stronger on the average. And partly,many students (those who have not yet been silenced for being “misogynic”)believe, because their hormones tend to make them more aggressive. Either way, and if only in order to enable them to fulfill their biological destiny, women must be protected against the full harshness of life. Didn’t you once tell you fiancé and subsequent wife,Martha Bernays, that the best thing a woman can do for herself is to take shelter in the home of a man?

Fourth, there is the vexed question of penis envy. If I have understood you correctly, you believe that it is something women are born with and which seizes them from the moment they understand, at a tender age, that they do not have a penis. I must say I am not sure I follow you here. Instead, I am open to Karen Horney’s idea that the reason why women suffer from penis envy—and they do!—is because the penis symbolizes all the advantages men enjoy in society. It is, so to speak, a shortcut to every thing else.

Finally, as you have said and written many times, every woman, if she is a real woman and not some kind of abomination, wants a child with all her heart. As the Biblical Rachel told her husband Jacob,“give me sons, or else I die.”

I would think that each of these desires on its own is straightforward enough. However, together they are anything but. Some of them women have in common with men, whereas others are theirs alone. Some overlap,whereas others contradict each other. Some are rooted in biology, others not. Since their relative importance changes from one person to another as well as overtime, they are also fluid. Age, upbringing, social circumstances, etc. intrude on the psyche, with the result that the number of possible variations is infinite.No two women, and no two men, are the same! That is precisely what makes the topic endlessly complex—and, as the art of all times and places shows,endlessly fascinating as well.

But whom am I telling all this? I do hope you won’t resent the musings of an old historian (I am as old as you were in 1929,the year in which you wrote Civilization and Its Discontents). As my excuse for sending you this letter, all I can say that I am as interested in the problem as you used to be and, perhaps, still are.

With deep gratitude for all your pioneering works

Martin van Creveld

Just Published! A Biography of Conscience

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

M. van Creveld, A Biography of Conscience, London, Reaktion, 2015.

Many would consider conscience to be one of the most important, if not the most important, quality that distinguished humans from animals on one hand and machines on the other. However, what is conscience? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely human invention? If so, how did it come into the world? Who invented it, where, when, and against what social background? What did the ancient philosophers have to say about it? How does it relate to religion, Judaism and Christianity in particular? How did conscience survive the secularization of the Western world after 1600 or so, and where is it today? Are there any societies that, not recognizing the idea of conscience, have developed and used other methods for internalizing social control? If so, what are those mechanism like?

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The present volume, the only one of its kind, attempts to provide answers to these and other questions. Well-documented but written in simple, jargon-free language, it starts in ancient Egypt. From there it leads all the way to present day campaigns aimed at hammering issues such as human rights, health and environmental into our consciences. Readers will learn about the Old Testament which, erroneously as it turns out, is normally seen as the fountainhead from which the Western idea of conscience has sprung. They will also meet Antigone, the first person on record ever to explicitly speak of conscience, syneidēsis in Greek, as a basis for action.

Next they will encounter the philosophers Zeno, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca; outstanding Christian thinkers such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and, above all, Luther with his famous saying, “here I stand, I cannot otherwise;” as well as modern intellectual giants. The list opens with Machiavelli, the man who, drawing a sharp line between private and public behavior, admitting conscience into the former but not into the latter. Next come Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Burton Skinner.

Separate chapters are devoted to Japan and China. Both are societies that, rather than relying on conscience as a method of social control, put their trust in shame and reverence instead. There are chapters dealing with the Nazis—starting with Hitler and proceeding downward, did the Nazis have any kind of conscience at all?—as well as the most recent discoveries in robotics and brain science. On the way readers will follow the evolution of conscience in many of its numerous, occasionally strange and even surprising, permutations.

The book concludes by arguing that, the claims of workers in artificial intelligence and brain science notwithstanding, we today are no closer to understanding the nature of conscience than we have ever been. In the words of one contemporary computer expert cum psychotherapist, probably we shall be able to build machines able to mimic conscience before we ever know what conscience really is.

He and She

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Some years ago I told a friend of mine, a female librarian who unfortunately has died since, that, for the first time, I was taking an interest in women. She looked at me and said: “It is time, don’t you think”?

Seriously, how did a military historian like myself ever start writing about women? The answer is twofold. First, during the 1990s, at the latest, the presence of women in the military, its causes, its significance, and its implications reached such a crescendo that it became impossible to ignore. Second, leafing through the works of the great military theorists I noted that none of them had anything to say about women. Yet women form half of the human race and by no means its least important half. Clearly there was a gap there, and one which, in Men, Women and War, I set out to fill as best I could.

Delving into women’s history, I found it fascinating. So much so, in fact, that since then I have devoted a considerable part of my work to that topic. Follows a brief summary of some of the things I think I have learnt.

First, when Steven Pinker and many others say that the characteristics of people of both sexes are in large part biologically-determined rather than socially-constructed they were right. Second, when Margaret Mead said that in all known societies what men do is considered most important and that, should women enter a male field in any numbers, the field in question will start losing both its prestige and the rewards it can offer she was right. Third, when Freud said that a great many women suffer from penis envy—whether biologically or socially based—he was right. After all, as I wrote in a previous essay posted on this website, what is modern feminism if not the greatest outburst of penis envy ever? Fourth, when Thomas Aquinas said that men can do anything women can (except for having children, of course) but not the other way around he was right. Fifth, when Plato said that, though no field of human endeavor is absolutely closed to the members of either sex, in all fields men are better on the average, he was right.

Another very important thing Plato said is that, whereas men and women are similar in some respects, they differ in others. The most important thing they have in common is their humanity, the qualities that distinguish them from animals. Including, above all, their big brains and the things they make possible. True, men have ten billion more brain cells than women on the average. But nobody knows what they serve for.

The most important differences—all of which are statistical and mean little if anything in the case of each individual—are as follows. First, women have less testosterone than men. That makes them less aggressive, less competitive, and less inclined towards dominance than men. Second, their bodies are weaker, less able to absorb shocks and blows, and, unless properly taken care of, less resistant to dirt and infectious disease. Until urbanization started changing things from about 1800 on, the outcome was a considerably shorter life expectancy. Third, women conceive, become pregnant, give birth, nurse, and, as with all other mammalians, are mainly responsible for raising the young. Whereas men do not and are not. Fourth, since men are able to have countless offspring whereas women cannot, society is better able to bear their loss than that of women. The enormous investment women make in their offspring, plus their relative physical weakness, also explains why, as Diderot said, women are less able to find delight in the arms of strangers than men.

To repeat, the differences are statistical. Hence they only go so far in dictating the fate of each individual. They are, however, sufficiently significant to explain many things concerning the way human society has always functioned and, presumably, will continue to function. Indeed there probably is no aspect of life, whether private or public, so isolated that sex and gender will not play a role in shaping it. First, in no known culture has there ever been a situation where all persons male and female, shared all activities on an equal basis and received the same rewards. Second, in all known cultures men did the lion’s share of hard, dirty, or dangerous work. Third, in all known cultures men were responsible for feeding women and not the other way around. Some, the above mentioned Margaret Mead included, saw this as the most important difference that set humans apart from other animals. Fourth, in all known cultures it was men who held the great majority of whatever public positions existed. Though some societies, one of which is traditional Judaism, trace descent by way of the female line, no known one has ever been governed by women. Finally, the higher the positions in question the more likely that they would be occupied by men.

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The objective of modern feminism has been to abolish these distinctions. Though not to the point where many women are prepared to marry and support men; several sets of statistics show that women who make more than their husbands are more likely to get a divorce. Depending on how one looks at it, the effort can be said to have been either a success or a failure. It has been a success in the sense that, watching old movies, one is always surprised at the fact that, among important decision makers, there are few if any women. Far more women now work outside the home and have careers than previously, and many of the legal hurdles that used to limit their participation in public life have been removed. The same applies to the kind of laws that made husbands the “heads of the family.” The introduction of the pill has also done away with many sexual restraints, enabling women to sleep around or, as the current phrase has it, “hook up” with men much as men themselves do.

As feminists never stop complaining, however, a society in which absolute equality prevails is as far away as it has ever been. Moreover, such advances as women have made

came at a high cost. Leaving the home, many women have lost their freedom and turned themselves into “wage slaves” just like men. Working women are heavily concentrated in the service sector, including the one known as “household services.” The outcome is that they now do for strangers what they used to do for their own families. They also pay taxes as never before. Since working outside the home means having to spend more on such things as clothing, transportation and help, whether most of them really end up by having more disposable income is doubtful; at least one highly successful female researcher, Elizabeth Warren, has warned against “the two-income trap.”

Judging by the number of best-sellers which claim to advise women on how to efficiently manage their time, no group in the population is more stressed than working mothers. These problems are literally killing them; whereas, for almost two hundred years before 1975, the gap in life expectancy between men and women kept growing in favor of the latter, since then it has been declining.

One reason why progress, if that is the right word, has been slow is that a society based on equality between the sexes might result in more divorced women losing custody over their children and being obliged to support their ex-husbands. It might also lead to the justice system treating women as harshly as it does men; increasing the penalties it imposes on them and executing them much more often than is actually the case. At present even military women only enter combat if it suits them. However, a truly equal system might oblige them to do so. All this explains why, judging by the failure to pass ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), many women are not at all certain whether equality is really what they want.

Even so, the attempt to separate sex—the biologically-determined identity of men and women—from gender—the roles they play in society—has led to a very sharp decline in fertility. That applies to all developed countries except the U.S and Israel. In the latter, to quote a popular song, “her eyes are tired but her legs are quite good looking.” So great is the decline that societies such as those of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore either are obliged to rely on immigrants to fill their labor force or simply appear to have no future.

Looking at Europe, what reliance on immigrants may mean, probably will mean, is becoming more and more clear with every passing day. As to having no future, it was that great feminist, Carroll Gilligan, who said that the essence of feminism consists of women looking after themselves first of all. With such an attitude, will there even be a future?

Feeling Embarrassed? Bring Your Dick

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Google News, 26.3.2014. A businesswoman is sitting at the table with some “dudes.” She feels they devalue her work, her skills, and herself merely because she is a woman. She loses confidence; what to do? Holly Wilson, a sculptor from Mustang, Oklahoma, thinks she has the answer. She has created a miniature penis, one-and a half inches long, and available in either bronze or silver. A woman who purchases it will be able to take it along to meetings. At the appropriate moment she can fumble in her pocket or handbag, put the tiny marvel on the table, and show it to her male business partners; after which, it is hoped, business can really get under way.

Ms. Wilson is hardly the only emancipated woman who hopes for a penis that will somehow empower her. Take Naomi Wolf, a self-declared “power feminist” writer who advised candidate Al Gore during the 2000 U.S presidential campaign. In Fire by Fire (1993) she explains how delighted she was by some ads she saw showing “phallic objects… emerg[ing]… from women’s [emphasis in the original] groins.” In the 1997 movie GI Jane the lead character, acted by Demmi More, demands that a U.S Army male instructor “suck her dick” (which, of course, she doesn’t have). The grand-priestess of modern feminism, Betty Friedan, in her 1981 book The Second Stage expressed her confidence that women would soon be able to join men in the “ballfield” where important political economic and social issues are decided. The list goes on and on.

The words of these and other leading feminist seem to belie the claim, made by Kate Millett and others, that penis envy is a lie invented by Freud specifically in order to keep women in their proper place. Freud himself first mentioned the term in a 1908 essay called “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” Later his followers picked it up and started strewing it over their own works like sequins over a dress. Yet the precise origin and significance of the phenomenon has always been in doubt. Karen Horney (1885-1952), one of Freud’s more important female students, believed that the penis merely acted as the symbol for all the advantages, real or imagined, men enjoy in society. Wrong, said another female disciple of the master, Jeanne Lampl de Groot (1895-1987). “The absence of a penis cannot be regarded as a matter of secondary and trifling significance for the little girl, as Karen Horney [thinks]… The material,” meaning her own clinical experiences and that of others brought to her attention, proved that “penis envy is a central point.” It is “from this point that the development into normal femininity begins”. Woman’s “wish for a penis is the consequence of a biological datum that underlies her psychic reaction of feeling inferior and is ‘rock bottom.’”

Many of these debates took place at Freud’s famous analytical seminars, held every Wednesday evening at his home. Another female analyst who participated in some of them was Helene Deutsch (1884-1982). Deutsch, one of the first women to receive a medical degree from any Austrian university, rightly considered herself, “a leader in female emancipation.” In 1925 she became the first member of Freud’s circle to publish a paper specifically dealing with the psychology of women, shocking Freud who himself had yet to produce anything of the kind. None of this prevented her from embracing the theory of the biological origin of penis envy heart and soul. The clitoris, she explained was but “an inadequate substitute” for the male organ. In 1935 Deutsch fled Germany for the U.S. Beautiful and very hard-working, she became a highly successful therapist, teacher and lecturer. In 1944-45 she published her two-volume work, The Psychology of Women. It turned her into the world’s foremost authority on the subject, a position she continued to hold for about three decades.

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While psychoanalytical opinion remains divided, a look at the world around us may help resolve the riddle. Indeed one could argue that the whole of modern feminism itself is nothing but the most gigantic, best-organized, exercise in penis-envy ever. If men wear trousers, women must do the same. If men spend most of their lives slaving away in factories and offices, then unless women share their fate and find jobs they consider themselves only half-human. If men undertake years of intensive training and embark on hazardous journeys to the moon and back, women must join them there. If men hit each other half to death in sports such as boxing, women too must enter the rink. If men join the military, travel to some war in some godforsaken country halfway around the world to fight and die there, then so must women. If men enjoy one-night stands then so, some recent psychologists claim, must women.

Not only is the list of examples endless, but it and continues to expand almost day by day. Judging by them, women’s—especially feminist women seeking “emancipation”—jealousy of men knows no bounds. Were Lampl de Groot and Deutsch right in claiming that it is rooted in biology? Or is the penis simply a symbol for the advantages men enjoy in society, as Horney claimed? Like most attempts to separate nature from nurture, the question does not seem to admit a final answer. But does it really matter? Perhaps the real clue to understanding the relationship between men and women is contained in the following sentence, uttered by God when he drove the first couple out of paradise. “Unto your man shall be your passion,” He told Eve; “and he shall govern you.”

So it has been, so it remains, and so, presumably, it will always be.

Why Freud Got It Wrong

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

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