Female genital anxieties, conflicts and typical mastery modes

This paper focuses on the female experience of her own body, the unique anxieties that arise from the nature of the female genitals and the role of the female body in female development. Following Freud's theories of the importance of integrating body experiences in the development of psychic structures, the girl's body and her efforts to integrate it are seen as uniquely feminine. Three anxieties are described--access, penetration and diffusivity. These represent dangers to body integrity comparable to, but different from, boys' experience of castration anxiety. Not only do different genitals give rise to different anxieties, the different body experiences give rise to different modes of mastery (defence) shaping different character structures. While males can readily form discrete, concrete mental representations of their genitals, females cannot. While the boy can rely on direct sensory experience, the developing girl must rely on proprioceptive experiences, symbolization, and on other people to aid her in defining her elusive genital experience. This interpretation of the female genital experience provides a psychoanalytic framework for the object embeddedness long observed as part of the feminine character.