Is the transition from infancy to self-awareness really easier for girls?
In chapter four of Reinventing Womanhood, Heilbrun tackles Freudian psychoanalysis. She distinguishes between the Freudian process and interpretation, separating the idea of social conditioning from his gender biased conclusions.
Freud began with the premise that, biologically, female fetuses devolved from male ones. We now, of course, recognize that all fetuses initially develop as females.
Freud was also unaware of what we now call “core gender identity”, the assignment of a child’s sexual identity. Rather than being a mere consequence of biology, as Freud assumed, we now understand how social conditioning during a child’s formative years impacts their sense of gender.
Finally, Freud “believed the male child to be in the correct, or ideal, relation to the mother.” Successfully navigating through the Oedipal crisis and becoming a lover of women. The female child, on the other hand, was destined to become a penis-envying, neurotic mess.
Taking these points into consideration, Heilbrun theorizes that:
the male child, not the female child, has the hardest adjustment in maturation: the infant’s first desire is to be the mother, to identify with her. For a girl child, this first, overpowering infant identity need never shift; for the boy child the shift will be essential.
This early shift becomes the male child’s first identity crisis. It is in these early stages of life that men first learn to construct a sense of self. Therefore, Heilbrun surmises that much of what may be called female complacency is due to this “lack of identity crisis”:
The girl undergoes no such ceremony, but she pays for serenity of passage with a lack of selfhood and of the will to autonomy that only the struggle for identity can confer.
This idea is interesting in light of the Hennig study, which illustrated how successful women emulated the father. By identifying with the father instead of the mother, some women initiated their own right of passage, a process of individualization, separating themselves from their mothers. Of course, as we have seen, women who do so often experience their own idenity crisis, seeking a later return to the feminine.
As women writers, writing contemporary female characters, we should compare this aspect of psychoanlysis with Murdock’s model of the Heroine’s Journey.
