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Its Truth is Marching On

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In last week’s post I mentioned PE (penis envy) as one of the most powerful drives that has always made the world go round and will presumably continue to do so until the lights go out. And not for the first time either. Each time I do so, I am sure to get some readers’ reactions. They tell me that modern brain science has not succeeded in identifying any such thing (this is analogues to saying that, since the scientific community has been unable to reproduce God’s results, the world does not exist). That Freud was an impostor most of whose opus, including not just PE but a great many other concepts he used in his decades-long attempt to understand how the human mind works, has been deservedly relegated to history’s dustbin. That he used to “molest” his helpless female patients (the worst thing that can be said about any man). And so on, and so on.

Such being the case, I’ve decided to post a slightly updated version of a post I posted for the first time on 16 June 2016. Hopefully it will tell readers what PE is and why I keep my belief in it; in other words, why its truth keeps marching on.

Any comments, welcome.

 

PE? PE!

 

 

 

 

 

The other day, walking through the Hebrew University library looking for something interesting to read, my eye hit a tome with the grand-sounding title, The Oxford Companion to the Mind. I opened it; a thousand pages. Edited by one Richard L. Gregory, CBE, MA (Cantab), DSC, LLD, FRS, and published (second edition), in 2004. The volume differs from the better known Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in that it is more than just a list of all kinds of symptoms, real and imaginary. Instead it is a wide-ranging encyclopedia. With alphabetically arranged articles about everything from the way the ancient Egyptians understood the mind to something called the halo effect.

How wonderful, I thought. An opportunity to refresh my understanding of a phenomenon which, as readers know, I have long been interested in: PE (penis envy). Full of anticipation, I turned the pages. What a disappointment! PE is just not there. Yok, as we Israelis, using a Turkish word, say.

Yet that is strange. It is not as if the volume ignores Freud and psychoanalysis. To the contrary, both merit fairly hefty articles. PE apart, Freudian and Freudian-derived ideas do figure in the book. In considerable numbers, what is more. Among them are the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, the inferiority complex, and many more.
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I decided to check. On Google.com PE has 1,270,000 hits; not a bad following for an idea that is supposed to be purely a figment of one man’s imagination (he himself has 40,400,000, no less). PE has 19,200, the Oedipus Complex 875,000, the Electra Complex (originally introduced by Carl Gustav Jung) 302,000, “inferiority complex” 8,740,000, and “castration anxiety” 162,000. The corresponding figures for Google.scholar are 52,500, 4,550, 2,600 30,900, and 22,300 respectively. On Ngram as of the year 2019, PE figured far more often than “inferiority complex,” “Oedipus Complex,” “Electra Complex,” and “castration anxiety.” All in all, PE seems to put on quite a respectable showing. Yet whereas the other four do have entries in the aforesaid Companion, PE does not.

What is going on here? Some claim that there is no way to prove that PE exists. That may be so; however, the same applies to all the rest. After all the methodology, which consists essentially of listening to patients in a room called a clinic that may or may not contain a couch, is always the same. So I decided to do a little historical research.

Before we delve into the topic itself, though, it is important to note that Freud, like many male gurus throughout history, attracted female patients and students as a lamp attracts moths. No wonder, that, since he valued them and treated them like daughters. It was to one of these women, a Viennese society lady, that Freud owed his professorship, a position he, being Jewish, might not have got without her help. To another, Marie Bonaparte, he owed his life. In 1938 it was she who paid off the Nazis to allow him and his family to leave Austria. Thus any idea that Freud hated women, or did not value them, or looked down on them, is so absurd that only sexually frustrated, half-crazed, present-day feminists can entertain it.

Freud first postulated the existence of PE in a contribution to the nature of sexuality he published in 1904. Two decades later, in 1925, it became the pillar of a 1925 paper he wrote named, Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds (“some psychological consequences of the anatomical differences between the sexes;” note the characteristically modest way of announcing a new idea). From this point on it often came up in his famous Wednesday evening seminars where he and his disciples, both male and female, discussed psychoanalysis. Both the men and the women tended to be highly intelligent and quite a few of them later attained fame in their own right. Certainly none was a cretin who simply allowed Freud to overrun him or her.

And how did the women in the company take to the concept? One of the most important, Freud’s own daughter Anna, sidestepped the problem altogether. The rest were divided. On one side of the debate was Karen Horney. Praised by subsequent feminists for having “a mind of her own,” she did not deny the existence of PE. Indeed she called Freud’s discovery of it “momentous.” However, following a then famous sociologist by the name of Georg Simmel, she argued that women envied men their penises not because their biology made them to but because the penis stood as a symbol for the advantages society conferred on men; in other words, PE, and what she called “the flight from womanhood,” was a consequence, not a cause. For expressing this view, Horney ended up by being thrown out of the New York psychoanalytical society.

Several other female members of Freud’s circle disagreed. One was Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, said to be the most biologically-reductionist among all his followers. Another was Jeanne Lampl de Groot. To her, “the absence of a penis could not be regarded as a matter of secondary and trifling significance for the little girl.” Rather, PE was “a central point [from which] the development into normal femininity begins.” “Woman’s wish for a penis is the consequence of a biological datum that underlies her psychic reaction of feeling inferior and is rock bottom.”

More important than either of those was Helene Deutsch. Good-looking, capable and extremely hard working, her Psychology of Women (1944) was considered authoritative for decades on end, Deutsch was one of the first Austrian women to receive a medical degree. She considered herself, with good reason, as “a leader in female emancipation.” Yet this did not prevent her from explaining that the clitoris was “an inadequate substitute” for a penis. As late as 2018, in an article originally published in 1964, a female psychotherapist by the name of Maria Torok wrote that “in every woman’s analysis there is inevitably a period in which appears a feeling of envy and covetousness for both the male sex organ and its symbolic equivalents.” Having made listening to women her profession, she should know.

Back to Freud. Then as today, finding out whether we humans are shaped by nature or nurture was a difficult, very often impossible, enterprise. Perhaps that is why Freud, who sometimes hesitated to tread where his followers romped, never voiced his opinion on the matter. Instead he contended himself with the famous question, “what does woman want?”

I too will leave the question open. I do, however, want to provide some examples of what, in my view, PE is. When women discard skirts and put on trousers, then that is PE. When some women complain (as has in fact happened!) that their daughters are not being diagnosed with ADHD as often as boys are, then that is PE. When women refuse to have children so they can have a career as men do, then that is PE. When women want to follow men to Afghanistan and Iraq so they can get themselves shot to pieces for some obscure cause no one understands, then that too is PE.

When some Jewish Israeli women defy a court order and dance with a Torah scroll at the Wailing Wall as Jewish men have been doing for ages, then that is PE. When famous feminist Betty Friedan says she wants to play in men’s “ballfield,” then that is PE. When feminist writer Jean Sinoda Bohlen says she wants to achieve men’s “potency,” then that is PE. When renowned feminist Naomi Wolf says she wants to see more ads with objects sticking out of “women’s [emphasis in the original] groins,” then that is PE doubled, tripled, and squared. In these and countless other cases, one can only conclude that women do in fact crave “the obvious ‘extra’ that [men] have” (Nancy Friday).

Always focusing on rights, never on duties. Always imagining that men have it better and trying to imitate them. Hardy ever coming up with something really new: not the telescope, not the microscope, not gravity, not the steam engine, not the computer (all the best-known female worker in the field, Ada Lovelace, did was to translate the article of an Italian engineering officer, Luigi Menabrea, and provide it with notes). To quote my wife, Dvora, perhaps the real reason why PE is left unmentioned in the Companion is because it is not a disease.

It is, rather, a normal state of mind.

Is That Clear?

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Starting at least as far back as ancient Greece, most thinking people have always been aware that everything around them is subject to change. Starting at least as far back as ancient Greece, most thinking people have always been aware that there are some things that never change but always remain essentially the same (for confirmation, re-read the book of Ecclesiastics). In today’s post I want to focus on the second kind in so far as they pertain to the nature of, and relationship between, men and women.

*

Men on the average are considerably stronger and more robust than women.

Ergo

Without men to defend them against other men, women are essentially defenseless.

*

Ergo

For this and other reasons, men can sleep with women without their consent; the opposite is almost impossible.

Women can have babies; men cannot. On the other hand, men can have far more offspring than women can.

Ergo

Both biologically and socially, women’s lives are more precious than those of men

Lacking physical strength and burdened with young offspring, women are more vulnerable than men.

Ergo

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Starting with war and fighting, in any society it is men who engage in the vast majority of dirty, difficult and dangerous kinds of work.

*

In any known society the vast majority of public posts are occupied by men; the higher the position, the more true this is.

*

Child bearing apart, in any known society both man and women believe that whatever men do is the most important of all. That is why, in any known society women, driven by penis envy, do their best to imitate men in everything; whereas the opposite is rare.

*

Based on these simple premises, any number of different societies can be and have been “constructed” (a term so dear to feminists of all sorts). Some are very small, numbering no more than a few hundred members at most, whereas others are very large. Some live in tiny villages, others in megacities. Some make their living by hunting-gathering, others by engaging in gigantic systems of industry and administration. Some are characterized by approximate equality between their members, others by sharp socio-economic and cultural differences between individual and classes. Some allow a great measure of social mobility, others do not.

Some are so decentralized as to be almost without a government worthy of the name, others highly centralized. Some are monogamous, others (the majority) polygamous, others still (a small minority) polyandrous. Some follow the principle of primogeniture, whereas others do not. Some are strongly influenced by religious beliefs of every kind, others only to a much smaller extent. Some keep men and women more or less segregated, whereas others allow the sexes to mix more or less freely. In all without exception, ultimately it is politics which (to quote Lenin) govern who gets what.

All merge with each other, grow into each other, and, quite often, separate from each other. However much they do so, though, none can escape the fundamental truths as listed above. Not for long, at any rate. And not without triggering processes that, unless they are reversed, may very well end in the collapse of the societies in question.

Is that clear?

Dear Doctor Freud

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Dear Doctor Freud:

 I hope this letter reaches you, wherever you may be. Also that you are feeling well and that your circumstances are sufficiently comfortable to enable you to read it, in case you feel like doing so.

Please allow me to say a few words a bout myself. I was born in 1946, just seven years after your death. Like you, I am a secular-minded Jew. Unlike you, I have spent practically all my life in Israel,a country which, in your day, did not yet exist. By profession I am a historian. You and I have something in common: both of us have spent much o four lives trying to understand how individuals and societies function. Albeit we have approached the problem from different angles, in different ways, and using different methodologies.

Originally I was a military historian (a field,incidentally, that was taught in very few, if any, universities in our time). But over the last twenty years I have taken a strong interest in feminism and women’s history; after all, starting at least as far back as the Odyssey, Mars and Venus have always got along quite nicely. I would go so far as to argue that, without women to support warriors and admire them and look after them and mourn them and open their arms to them after their return from the battlefield,there would have been no war. After all, what is the point?

It was against this background that I came across your famous question, “was will das Weib,” what does a woman want. It bothered me, as it did you. For whatever it may be worth, I want to provide you with my own private attempt to answer it.

First, women want to love and be loved. As well as respected, admired, and, yes, even worshiped. Don’t we all?

Second, women want to be treated equally with men. In other words, to have the kind of relationship with them that will enable people of both sexes to work in harmony towards a common goal; including, above all, raising a family and leading the good life. At the same time, though, they want to be treated as women. Meaning, with the kind of special consideration they believe, in my opinion rightly, that the fact that they are the mothers of the race as well as their relative physical vulnerability entitles them to.

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Third, women want a man to defend them. When everything is said and done, only men can protect a woman against other men.Partly that is because men are physically stronger on the average. And partly,many students (those who have not yet been silenced for being “misogynic”)believe, because their hormones tend to make them more aggressive.  Either way, and if only in order to enable them to fulfill their biological destiny, women must be protected against the full harshness of life. Didn’t you once tell you fiancé and subsequent wife,Martha Bernays, that the best thing a woman can do for herself is to take shelter in the home of a man?

Fourth, there is the vexed question of penis envy. If I have understood you correctly, you believe that it is something women are born with and which seizes them from the moment they understand, at a tender age, that they do not have a penis. I must say I am not sure I follow you here. Instead, I am open to Karen Horney’s idea that the reason why women suffer from penis envy—and they do!—is because the penis symbolizes all the advantages men enjoy in society. It is, so to speak, a shortcut to every thing else.

Finally, as you have said and written many times, every woman, if she is a real woman and not some kind of abomination, wants a child with all her heart. As the Biblical Rachel told her husband Jacob,“give me sons, or else I die.”

I would think that each of these desires on its own is straightforward enough. However, together they are anything but. Some of them women have in common with men, whereas others are theirs alone. Some overlap,whereas others contradict each other. Some are rooted in biology, others not. Since their relative importance changes from one person to another as well as overtime, they are also fluid. Age, upbringing, social circumstances, etc. intrude on the psyche, with the result that the number of possible variations is infinite.No two women, and no two men, are the same! That is precisely what makes the topic endlessly complex—and, as the art of all times and places shows,endlessly fascinating as well.

But whom am I telling all this? I do hope you won’t resent the musings of an old historian (I am as old as you were in 1929,the year in which you wrote Civilization and Its Discontents). As my excuse for sending you this letter, all I can say that I am as interested in the problem as you used to be and, perhaps, still are.

With deep gratitude for all your pioneering works

Martin van Creveld


Male and Female*

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As many readers know, I have spent part of my career as a historian doing my modest best to understand the relationship between men and women. The outcome, so far, has been two scholarly books—Men, Women and War and The Privileged Sex. Between them they were published in five languages. As well as numerous articles in scholarly and not so scholarly journals and magazines; some of which I have put on this blog.

That explains why I keep receiving quite a few emails on the topic. Some correspondents call me names, among which a reactionary patriarchal-male-chauvinist-racist-pig-who-does-not-deserve-to-live is one of the more sympathetic. Others, apparently in the belief that anyone who does not accept the feminists’ claims in their entirety must be out of his mind, try to psychoanalyze me. And some simply dispute my views.

The first and second categories I routinely ignore. The third I rather enjoy; to quote Epicurus, what is better than discussing things with friends? If possible, while sitting in a garden (mine is small, but it will do for the purpose) and enjoying a glass of wine. Over the Net, if it is not. As long as it is done in the spirit of inquiry and without rancor.

Sticking to the enjoyable kind, most of them point out how much things have changed. As, for example, with women now forming the majority among students and getting better notes both at school and at the universities. And as with women abandoning marriage, children and household to take up all kinds of careers.

Here, to the contrary, I want to point to a few things that have not changed. Needless to say, all references to men and women apply to averages. Meaning that they say very little about individual people of either sex.

* For reasons unknown, proportionally twice as many women as men visit psychologists, faith healers, etc. What that means about their state of mental health, past, present and future, I leave it to readers to decide.

* Women suffer from penis envy (see my post, PE? PE!, 16.6.2016) whereas men, whatever other problems they may have, do not. As a result, women believe that whatever men are and do is better than what they themselves are and do. Proceeding chronologically, more or less, if men have the vote women must have it too. If men get a higher education, women must do so too. If men drive, women must drive too. If men smoke, women must smoke too. If men are wage slaves, women must aspire to become the same. The more the better! If men go to war, then women must do so too. To use an example from my own people, if Jewish men wear tales, Jewish women must do so too. Or else, they feel, there is something missing from their Jewishness.

* Always imitating men—as Marx wrote, whenever revolution comes women, the ugly ones included, are swept along—rarely do women initiate any important discovery or invention. Even the term feminism itself was coined by a man! That is why, though a minority of dissatisfied and aggressive women were able to inflict the vote on the rest and make them work outside the home, they have contributed nothing new to the solution of the world’s problems.

* It is also why, the more modern and innovative an industry the fewer the women who work in it, especially at the higher levels. Also why, as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has just said, men continue to rule the world. Conversely, the presence, beyond a certain point, of women at the higher ranks of any kind of human institute or organization is itself a sign that the institute or organization in question has started to decline and may soon become moribund.

* Women—real women, not emaciated nervous wrecks, desperate not to develop precisely the physical characteristics that distinguish them from men—give birth, whereas men do not. To speak with Nietzsche, the latter are “the infertile sex.” The resulting existential problems do much to account for men’s stronger drive to achieve, as manifested throughout history.
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* Partly because they are stronger, physically, and partly because they do not have to take time off for pregnancy, delivery, and lactation, men’s income is considerably greater than that of women. Retirement apart—so many successful men, dying before their wives, leave them their property and their pension—the older people of both sexes are, the larger the gap. Not just in terms of money, but in those of power and fame as well.

* Today as ever, the higher on the greasy pole one climbs. the fewer women one meets. Proportionally more of those one does meet are where they are because they stand on the shoulders of their male relatives, as Sirimavo Bandaranaike (the first female prime minister in history), Indira Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, and Hillary Clinton e.g. did. Or else because they are active in fields, such as modelling, singing, and acting, where men, as men, are excluded.

* Is it necessary to point out that men, apart from being stronger, are also more resistant to infectious diseases that result from dirt entering the body’s orifices? This explains why, at all times and places the hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work has always been done almost exclusively by men. As figures concerning industrial accidents show, this continues to be the case today.

* Since women can have far, far fewer children than men, biologically speaking their lives are more precious. Much as feminists cry out for their sisters’ right to become soldiers and fight, no society, on pain of extinction, can afford to lose large numbers of women. That is one reason why men—and, in some nonhuman species, males—keep sacrificing their lives for women; whereas the opposite only happens very rarely. Also why very, very few women have ever fought in war. True, the number of those who did so in uprisings, rebellions, insurgencies, etc. was somewhat larger. However, in all countries without exception it still remains far smaller than that of men.

* Women who have sex with men, being considerably weaker than their partners, put themselves at the latter’s mercy. That, rather than a weak libido, is why they require greater security, both physical and emotional. The difference in strength also explains why, outside the bedroom they are more likely than men to rely on cunning and flattery. If those two don’t work they are also more likely to complain, open the tear-faucet, and show a bit of cleavage.

* Men, producing almost inconceivably large number of spermatozoids each of which is capable of fertilizing an egg, are naturally polygamous; women, producing far fewer eggs but requiring assistance in raising their children, are naturally monogamous. That is why polyandrous societies are rare indeed. Also why attempts, and there have been a few, to set up brothels for women have invariably failed.

Conclusion: Some things have undoubtedly changed. But others, including many of the most important ones, have not. Nor do I see any signs that they will.

 

* Thanks to Mr. Larry Kummer, whose post on this topic made me think. Really think.

PE? PE!

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The other day, walking through the Hebrew University library and looking for something interesting to read, my eye hit a tome with the grand-sounding title, The Oxford Companion to the Mind. I opened it; a thousand pages. Edited by one Richard L. Gregory, CBE, MA (Cantab), DSC, LLD, FRS, and published (second edition), in 2004. The volume differs from the better known Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in that it is more than just a list of all kinds of symptoms, real and imaginary. Instead it is a wide-ranging encyclopedia. With alphabetically arranged articles about everything from the way the ancient Egyptians understood the mind to something called the halo effect.

How wonderful, I thought. An opportunity to refresh my understanding of a phenomenon which, as readers know, I have long been interested in: PE (penis envy). Full of anticipation, I turned the pages. What a disappointment! PE is just not there. Yok, as we Israelis, using a Turkish word, say.

Yet that is strange. It is not as if the volume ignores Freud and psychoanalysis. To the contrary, both merit fairly hefty articles. PE apart, Freudian and Freudian-derived ideas do figure in the book. In considerable numbers, what is more. Among them are the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, the inferiority complex, and many more.

I decided to check. On Google.com PE has 422,000 hits. The Oedipus Complex has 431,000, the Electra Complex 159,000, “inferiority complex,” 411,000, and “castration anxiety” 87,400. The figures for Google.scholar are 12,100, 35,200, 2,600 30,900, and 14,800 respectively. On Ngram as of the year 2000, PE figured about as often as “inferiority complex” and far more often than did “Oedipus Complex,” “Electra Complex,” and “castration anxiety.” All in all, PE seems to put on quite a respectable showing. Yet whereas the other three do have entries in the aforesaid Companion, PE does not.

What is going on here? Some claim that there is no way to prove that PE exists. That may be so; however, the same applies to all the rest. After all the methodology, which consists essentially of listening to patients in a room called a clinic that may or may not contain a couch, is always the same. So I decided to do a little historical research.

Before we delve into the topic itself, though, it is important to note that Freud, like many male gurus throughout history, attracted female patients and students as a lamp attracts moths. No wonder, that, since he valued them and treated them like daughters. It was to one of these women, a Viennese society lady, that Freud owed his professorship, a position he, being Jewish, might not have got without her help. To another, Marie Bonaparte, he owed his life. In 1938 it was she who paid off the Nazis to allow him and his family to leave Austria. Thus any idea that Freud hated women, or did not value them, or looked down on them, is so absurd that only half-crazed present-day feminists can entertain it.

Freud first postulated the existence of PE in a contribution to the nature of sexuality he published in 1904. From this point on the concept often came up in his famous Wednesday evening seminars where he and his disciples, both male and female, discussed psychoanalysis. Both the men and the women tended to be highly intelligent. Quite a few of them later attained fame in their own right. None of them was a cretin who simply allowed Freud to overrun him or her.

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And how did the women in the company take to the concept? One of the most important, Freud’s own daughter Anna, sidestepped the problem altogether. Not only did she focus on children, but she herself probably died a virgin. The rest were divided. On one side of the debate was Karen Horney. She did not deny the existence of PE; however, she argued that women envied men their penises not because their biology made them to but because the penis stood a symbol for the advantages society conferred on men. In other words, PE, and what she called “the flight from womanhood,” was a consequence, not a cause. For expressing this view, Horney ended up by being thrown out of the New York psychoanalytical society.

Several other female members of Freud’s circle disagreed. One was Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, said to be the most biologically-reductionist among all his followers. Another was Jeanne Lampl de Groot. To her, “the absence of a penis could not be regarded as a matter of secondary and trifling significance for the little girl.” Rather, PE was “a central point [from which] the development into normal femininity begins.” “Woman’s wish for a penis is the consequence of a biological datum that underlies her psychic reaction of feeling inferior and is rock bottom.”

More important than either of those was Helene Deutsch. Good-looking, capable and extremely hard working, her Psychology of Women (1944) was considered authoritative for decades on end, Deutsch was one of the first Austrian women to receive a medical degree. She considered herself, with good reason, as “a leader in female emancipation.” Yet this did not prevent her from explaining that the clitoris was “an inadequate substitute” for a penis. As late as 1998 a female psychotherapist by the name of Maria Torok wrote that “in every woman’s analysis there is inevitably a period in which appears a feeling of envy and covetousness for both the male sex organ and its symbolic equivalents.” Having made listening to women her profession, she should know.

Back to Freud. Then as today, finding out whether we humans are shaped by nature or nurture was a difficult, very often impossible, enterprise. Perhaps that is why Freud, who sometimes hesitated to enter where his followers treaded, never voiced his opinion on the matter. Instead he contended himself with the famous question, “what does woman want?”

I too will leave the question open. I do, however, want to provide some examples of what, in my view, PE is. When women discard skirts and put on trousers, then that is PE. When some women complain (as has in fact happened!) that their daughters are not being diagnosed with ADHD as often as boys are, then that is PE. When women refuse to have children so that they can have a career as men do, then that is PE. When women want to follow men to Afghanistan so they can get themselves shot to pieces for some obscure cause no one understands, then that too is PE.

When some Jewish Israeli women defy a court order and dance with a Torah scroll at the Wailing Wall as Jewish men have been doing for ages, then that is PE. When renowned feminist Betty Friedan says she wants to play in men’s “ballfield,” then that is PE. When the almost equally renowned feminist Naomi Wolf says she wants to see more ads with objects sticking out of “women’s [emphasis in the original] groins,” then that is PE doubled, tripled, and squared. In these and countless other cases, one can only conclude that women do in fact crave “the obvious ‘extra’ that [men] have” (Nancy Friday).

Always imagining men having it better and trying to imitate them. Never, but never, trying to invent something original men have not already done a zillion times and doing it. To quote my wife, perhaps the real reason why PE is left unmentioned in the Companion is because it is not a disease. It is a normal state of mind.