Envy of the penis — the basic postulate of Freudian psychoanalysis — raises doubts in many women. But how many men are ready to challenge him? One of the first was the original Russian philosopher of the twentieth century, Ivan Solovyov. Excerpt.
“One of my acquaintances once admitted that she received a visual representation of the structure of the female body only by carefully examining her newborn daughter. I was amazed: after all, a married woman, and only then did I feel the whole abyss separating us from women. For us, since childhood, it has been a toy, then a tool, and always in sight, tangible and achievable. It is outside, but for women it is inside: such a secret that they themselves do not have clear access to it. They do not know themselves, but we know ourselves: it is this difference of being outgoing from oneself and returning to oneself that lies in the division of the sexes.
Alberto Moravio has a novel «Me and Him», which consists of an incessant dialogue between a man and his penis: a man reproaches him, reasoned with him, and the subject rebels and involves him in adventures. The bottom line is that my penis is really my little brother, my other «I», a naughty double that has the same expressed being as my whole body. This means that I am initially bifurcated, external to myself, I am always at hand, I catch and catch myself on the “verb of being”, on the “creative word”.
My penis is my little brother, the second «I», a rebellious double that has the same expressed being as my whole body.
And for a woman, this is not a separate object, but an belonging to the whole body, a gaping in it: being does not appear to self-consciousness, but plunges into non-being. That is why a woman’s will is primarily to be, to procreate, to merge with nature, because inwardly she is all in non-existence, in the abyss, deeply penetrating from her. Everything that exists, by its very existence, has an inexplicable value for a woman. A man plays with his being, touches, blasphemes, masturbates, as with an object of self-consciousness. And for him, the decisive question is not about being, but about meaning, about ways to use and dispose of being, to think and remake it. For just as the beginning of being is external to him, contemplated and tangible, so is he external to his being, as if he constantly sees himself in a mirror, winks at himself, discusses himself with himself. Is it because a woman needs a mirror so much that, unlike a man, she is deprived of it in herself: hidden, hidden in her insides — and therefore forced to look into something external. And she always has a mirror at hand, like a man’s — his natural counterpart. He does not need this fragile piece of glass in his purse, because he carries his continuation-reflection with him alive and can always find and identify himself.
In some respects, an experienced woman is less aware of herself than a little boy, who has been playing with his trinket since he can remember himself, and holds it in his hands every time he walks in a small way, and in general has lost his sense of mystery towards her, because uses it many times a day.
- Why are girls not like boys?
One of Freud’s major discoveries is that girls are always jealous of boys and that this «penis envy» is a defining moment in female psychology. Some, they say, have something that others do not. Indeed, such is the human prejudice: it is always better to have than not to have. But on the other hand, who is more inquisitive to whom, who senses an inexplicable mystery in whom? If, on the one hand, envy is admitted, then on the other hand, there is an equally strong sense of enigma, caused precisely by the lack of what boys have and know everyday and thoroughly. In the girl there is a call to the unknown, «foggy distance», and it is not known what is more significant in the final comparison: a visual presence or an enticing absence.
The XNUMXth century, marching with Freud at the head into the XNUMXth, got used to a positive, almost weighty solution to the question of being: an appendage to the body is better than a flaw and a notch. But I never saw or heard that the girl envied the boy, but the opposite interest was repeatedly noticed: the boy tried to spy on the girl, what was she in the place where he had a known object. And in relation to mothers, grandmothers — all the same cognitive aspiration. One friend recalls how, at the age of five, when his mother was falling asleep, he would crawl under her blanket with a flashlight and try to see at least something … But where can it be, if only darker darkness emerges from the darkness.
And in fact: that hidden, darkly translucent thing that a woman “instead of” promises something much more than such an extra one in space, dangling vacantly, as if hastily and in the wrong place sewn. There — a long road, a buzzing shell in pink bodily curls, delicate doors and a dark shutter, the secret of secrets, and here — a miserable pendant, weaker than a finger; well, where with her? just take out the waste, that’s her place among the waste. My penis is, indeed, my little brother, my second «I», a naughty double that has the same expressed being as my whole body. A woman holds an unknown kingdom inside herself, far away, far away, with some kind of seas, fogs, islands, moorings, and with me everything is smoothed, well-groomed, flat, and only some kind of rag is trimmed.
Thus I resurrect the course of my childish thoughts and make sure that the great scientist treated the boyish trifle with excessive respect, and the girlish flaw with undue disdain. No, if the girl envies the boy’s body, as a little more, with an increase, then the boy is attracted and disturbed by the girl’s body as immeasurably larger, with depth. And do not exchange this wrinkled increase for a volcanic world full of uncertainty, where Alice — as if into herself — descended through a dark vent.
A woman holds an unknown kingdom inside herself, far away, far away, with some kind of seas, fogs, islands, moorings …
So it is in the relations of the adult sexes … Men invented the envy of women for their civil rights, while much more than this increase, wrinkled from daily, legal use, worries about the one-time miracle of conception, when a whole unprecedented world emerges from the depths of a woman. Should this unknown world in man be exchanged for human rights in the known world?
It seems to me that deep people are always a little bit of a woman. And if they have some kind of envy, then it is precisely for gaping and absence.1
1 Ivan Solovyov’s reflections on Eros were written in the mid-1960s, and published much later in the journal Chelovek (Science, 1991, No. 1).