Psychoanalytic constructions of female development and women's conflicts about achievement--Part II

Central to the dynamics that underlie women's conflicts about their own autonomous achievements are the reappraised psychoanalytic concepts of penis envy and masochism. These ideas need not be abandoned because of the phallocentric bias that is responsible for their initial formulation. When they are conceptualized as serving defensive ego-maintaining functions for the woman, their richness in expressing aspects of women's psychological experiences becomes evident. Both culturally ascribed meanings to physiological differences and the physical differences themselves have an impact on an individual's developing psychological sense of self, and of self in relation to others. Girls and boys have different anatomies, which give rise to different bodily sensations, different definitions of what is acceptable and what is taboo, and arouse different feelings and reactions in caretakers on whom the child is dependent. The girl's developmental task of separation and individuation is complicated in two major ways that are relevant to adult women's achievement-related conflicts. First, as a female child, she is both more closely identified with her mother and more closely identified with by her mother. Her sensitivity to relationship and loss--particularly in her bond to her mother--grows in part from the intensities of these reciprocal identifications and from the capacities for empathic, affective relating that cultural and maternal expectations impart to daughters. Because mothers are so identified with their same-sex children, and because, as women, they themselves have learned to sacrifice aspects of their autonomy for either nurturant or dependent functions, mothers communicate ambivalent wishes and expectations to their daughters. On the one hand, a daughter receives the injunction that she carry on for her mother by fulfilling her thwarted longings and by compensating, with her own achievements, for her mother's disappointments. On the other hand, the daughter receives the simultaneous message that her accomplishments arouse her mother's envy and potential retaliation, but, most destructively, threaten to leave her empty, without a dependent appendage through whom she can live and bolster her self-worth. The second, complicated, aspect of the girl's task of separation and individuation, which relates to her adult conflicts around achievement, lies in the relationship between the cultural devaluation of whatever women have to do, and the kinds of fantasies and experiences to which the more hidden, internal and mysterious female genitals lend themselves.