Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory

Ever since the American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall invited the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909, Freudian psychoanalytic theory has had an enormous impact on American understandings of gender and sexuality. Freudian theory has influenced conceptions of masculinity in the United States by emphasizing male heterosexual identity as a social construction maintained through the control of repressed impulses and homosexual desires. In early works such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud posited the crucial role played by the unconscious mind and repression in the formation of subjectivity. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he made the groundbreaking claim that gender—far from an innate or inevitable consequence of biological sex— was the precarious product of a complex psychic and social process, fraught with anxiety and contradiction. While Freud viewed such a process as an essential attribute of civilization, he nonetheless emphasized the unstable, conflicted, and provisional nature of the sexual identity resulting from it. Many of Freud's assertions were considered scandalous in the United States at the time, offending Victorian propriety in their insistence upon the role of infantile sexuality and their rejection of the Victorian emphasis on the strict regulation of sexual impulses as essential to mental health.

Freud's theory of male sexual identity revolves around: (1) the Oedipus complex, and (2) the castration complex to which the Oedipus complex gives rise, and through which it is ultimately resolved. According to the theory of the Oedipus complex, the child's first love object is its mother, who through acts of feeding and caretaking provides the child with its earliest bodily pleasures and satisfactions. In the case of a boy, this early desire for the mother—whom he recognizes as “belonging to” the father in some sense—is threatened by fears of castration at the hands of the father, his rival. These fears are instigated by the boy's apprehension of anatomical sexual difference and his assumption that women—lacking the penis that he values so highly—have been castrated. Anxieties over real or imagined threats of castration lead the boy to relinquish his desire for the mother and to content himself instead with a future substitute for her. The boy's rivalry with the father, who represents the cultural authority of patriarchy, is subsumed by an intensified identification with him. This turn toward an identification with the father and the repression of the early desire for the mother pave the way for the boy's heterosexual identity. The paternal identification, and the prohibition against incest on which it is founded, provides the basis for the formation of the boy's superego—the psychical agency that censors and judges, and to which Freud attributed men's supposedly superior ethical sense.

Although Freud postulated the theoretical possibility of a “positive” resolution of the Oedipus complex along heterosexual lines—in which the boy comes to identify with members of his own sex and desire members of the opposite sex—he asserted that a complete positive resolution of the complex rarely, if ever, occurs. According to Freud, masculine and feminine traits, active and passive inclinations, and homosexual and heterosexual object choices are universal and ongoing elements of psychic life and do not correspond in any predetermined way to biological males or females. As outlined in Freud's “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), children are originally endowed with a fluid bisexuality comprised of active and passive aims and oriented toward both male and female objects. Heterosexual masculinity itself is founded upon the repression of an early homosexual desire for the father and the repudiation of an identification with the mother, and is maintained through the ongoing repression of homosexual attachments and passive or feminine identifications.

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