In psychoanalysis, phallic woman is a concept to describe a woman with the symbolic attributes of the phallus. More generally, it describes any woman possessing traditionally masculine characteristics. [1]
Phallic mother
Freud considered that at the phallic stage of early childhood development, children of both sexes attribute possession of a penis to the mother—a belief the loss of which helps precipitate the castration complex. [2] Thereafter males may seek fetishistic substitutes in women for the lost penis in the form of high heels, earrings or long hair to alleviate the castrative threat [3]—terrifying phallic women such as witches (with their broomsticks) representing the failure of such substitutes to cover the underlying anxiety. [4] The female, whose love (in Freud's view) was originally "directed to her phallic mother", [5] may thereafter either turn to her father for love, or may return to an identification with the original phallic mother in a neurotic development. [6]
The phallic mother can be (though need not necessarily be) an actively castrative figure, stifling her children by pre-empting all room for autonomous action. [7]
Phallus girl
Rather than seeking or identifying with the phallic mother, libido may instead be directed at the figure that has been termed the phallus-girl. [8] For the male, the phallus girl may be represented by a younger (perhaps boyish) girl, in whom he can find an image of his own adolescent self. [9] For the female, such a position may either entail a submissive merger with the male partner (identification with a body-part), [10] or an exhibitionist display of the self as phallus: as Ella Sharpe put it of a dancer, "she was the magical phallus. The dancing was in her". [11]
Soft porn marks out the phallus girl through such symbols as whips, bikes and guns; [12] while she also underpins the action heroine such as Ripley or Lara Croft. [13]
Later developments
The twenty-first century ladette can be seen as a phallic girl—her emphasis on light-hearted, recreational sex serving as a passport to being 'one of the boys'. [14]
Artistic analogues
- Picasso in the interwar years produced many paintings of women with phallic attributes. [15]
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer demonstrates an ambivalent relationship to her phallic power as slayer/staker. [16]
See also
References
- ^ B. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (2012) p. 157
- ^ S. Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 310-11
- ^ E. A. Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock (1991) p. 91
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 330 and p. 341
- ^ S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 2) p. 160
- ^ M. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan (1991) p. 215
- ^ M. Parsons, The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes (2000) p. 109
- ^ J. Mitchell/J. Rose eds., Feminine Sexuality (1982) p. 94
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 332-3
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 350
- ^ Quoted in M. Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis (2005) p. 29
- ^ B. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (2012) p. 116
- ^ M. Mark, Divas on Screen (2004) p. 68
- ^ A. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (2009) p. 83
- ^ R. Penrose ed., Picasso 1881/1973 (1973) p. 91-4
- ^ J. Davidson, The Psychology of Joss Whedon (2013) p. 107
Further reading
- Henry A. Bunker, 'The Voice as (Female) Phallus', Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1934) III: 391-420
- Otto Fenichel, 'The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus', Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1949 [1936]) XX (3): 303-24
- Marcia Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother (1993)