Identification with father is not 'penis envy'

Benjamin brings feminist and gender theories to traditional psychoanalytic theory by tackling the problematic concept  of penis envy. She reinterprets the Freudian concept of "penis envy” by noting that a little girl bulwarks her striving for agency and subjectivity by identifying with the father -- classically thought of as the ‘wish to be masculine.’ She posits that the female (and male) child identifies with the preoedipal father as the idealized subject who possesses agency and desire separate from the mother’s.  Identification with the father and the otherness he represents is a normal developmental step for children of both sexes. [Freud’s idea that penis envy is the sine qua non of female sexual development is a gross error in his attempts to understand female development. Note that terms such as penis envy or phallus are androcentric.]   

Possession of otherness by the father has been conflated with the possession of the penis, phallic power. The penis  becomes a symbol for the girl’s wish to be like the father in subjectivity and the wish that the father recognize the child as a like subject. It is the failure of the preoedipal father to recognize and welcome the girl’s (and boy’s) normatively developmental need to identify with the father --and not the little girl's realization of anatomical difference--that leads to penis envy. This failure by father risks later impairment of the girl’s subjectivity and agency and may lead to later masochistic submission to an idealized male. This disallowal of identification is also a disallowal of cross sex identifications and, as such, limits the richness available from multiply gendered identifications and expressions.

In the TBIPS Gender course there is much coming to terms with gender fluidity and being comfortable with the unfamiliar. Euripides Gravas noted that identification denied leads to envy. Jennifer Schafer mused about the possible multiple configurations of genders available as parental figures. Stamatina Kaidantzi explained that it is not the sex or gender identification of the non-caregiver parent but it is the otherness, the separateness from the caregiver, with all the comings and goings from home, that propels the preoedipal child’s wish --akin to the ‘love affair with the world' -- to identify with that other parent. Even in the absence of a second parent, that otherness exists. In addition to the caregiver/mother’s ability to ‘survive’ -- which, according to Winnicott, places her outside the fantasized omnipotent control of the infant and makes her external and a subject in her own right, and thus worthy also of identification -- the father may well be a solidifying identification for the child’s agency and desire, that is, for her subjectivity. Little girls do not feel inferior and certainly not because they are different from father; they just want to be different from mother while still retaining likeness.

Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and Daughter: Identification with Difference — A Contribution to Gender Heterodoxy. Psychoanal. Dial., 1(3):277-299.