А woman and her place in society in the works of Sigmund Freud.

In his works “Totem and Taboo” (1913) [1], “Moses and Monotheism” (1938) [2], Freud explores the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious as a concept of transmission and inheritance of the laws of society and culture. Every person has in their subconscious ideas about the history of mankind, which cannot begin anew with the life of an individual, but continues thanks to this memory. Among these ideas, one of the most important is the idea of ​​our sexual identity, of this “masculinity” or “femininity” that is always far from the ideal.


According to Freud's theories, a girl finds her female identification in the world of patriarchy when she goes through the so-called “positive Oedipus complex” [3], when she is seduced by her father, or when she seduces her father. However, the girl is already to some extent aware of her castration even before castration is confirmed by the intervention of the father. Since she does not inherit the phallus, she does not have to accept symbolic castration (she knows that she is already castrated). The Oedipus complex is thus her way of joining the universal human heritage of femininity.


Freud argued that women are bisexual, perhaps by this he wanted to say that in the world of patriarchy, the girl’s desire to be a phallus for her mother and at the same time take the place of her father has the same place as the boy’s right to this. According to Freud's theory, bisexual coloring remains very strong for a girl before the Oedipus phase, and the Oedipus complex is a secondary formation for her. It allows the girl to learn that by obeying her father’s law she receives the right to become the embodiment of “nature,” “sexuality,” and the chaos of spontaneous, intuitive creativity. She herself cannot become part of the law, which means that her submission to the law must take the form of its opposite, which is associated with irrationality and love.


Freud believed that masochism, passivity and narcissism have a biological etiology in women. However, he noted that it is possible that social customs may place women in a passive position and that "the suppression of female aggressiveness, which is constitutionally prescribed and imposed on them by society, contributes to the development of powerful masochistic impulses" [4]. He referred to the acceptance of an inferior state without a penis as the basis for future submission and passivity. The tendency to internalize aggression was the biological basis of masochism.


As is known, for Freud also all psychological and, ultimately, social characteristics of a person is inherited from his biology. He said that anatomy is destiny. And although this is true for both men and women, the woman turned out to be inferior, doomed to eternal envy of the male anatomy: “for women: penis envy is a positive desire to possess male genitals, and for men: a struggle against their passive or feminine relationships with other men" [5]. He talks about the “denial of femininity”, which is equally fair for both sexes, while women have “the desire to be masculine in a certain period of the ego-syntonic, namely in the phallic phase before the development of femininity begins. But then it gives way to the important process of repression, the outcome of which, as has been shown many times, determines the fate of a woman’s femininity” [5].


One cannot ignore the peculiarities of female psychology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when, as is known, the first steps were taken in the study of hysteria. We know that Freud attributed the hysterical symptoms that women experienced at the time to cultural influences and sexual repression [6]. For many years, this disease was considered exclusively female and its symptoms were attributed to any strong and demonstrative reaction to stress. Over time, the understanding of this phenomenon became more complex, and the realization came that a neurotic character, like hysterical psychosis, occurs almost equally in women and in men.


Usually the reason for the development of a hysterical structure is the family, where the little girl has the opportunity to observe how both or one of the parents are more inclined to her brother (brothers). This is also, perhaps, a situation when a girl feels her parents’ desire for her to be a boy. Or that her father and other male family members have significantly more power than her mother or sisters. The fathers of many hysterical women are both impressive and attractive personalities, which enriches the possibilities of her identifications.

This is the peculiarity of the position of women in Freud's contemporary culture, which we can rightfully call patriarchal. To generalize, we can say: a man is determined by participation in socio-historical, mainly class, structures, while a woman (as a woman herself, regardless of the role that may belong to her in production processes) is determined by her place in the structures of the family, and the family in turn, shapes women so that they remain in it. Differences in class, historical periods, and social institutions change specific attitudes towards manifestations of femininity; but in relation to the law of the father, the position of women generally remains unchanged even today.