FEELING AND IDEOLOGY
67
tively. And yet if the physicist's head gets in his own light when he is
looking at the electron, how much more true this must be of psycho–
logical theorizing, apart from the fact that there can not even yet be
data good enough for empirical backing to any firm psychological theory.
In the name of freedom from excessive social control of instinct,
Freudianism itself invented a new sexual conformity; its assertion of
pan-sexuality in fact increased the general sense of sexual inadequacy
(or anxiety at falling below the standard or
mores) .
The new con–
formity, moreover, was doubly artificial because Freud undoubtedly
confused sexuality and masculinity. Women may be vague about what
goes on in their own minds but Freud, in being so very definite, was
far more misleading. It is very difficult for man or woman to experience
the processes of thought and feeling which have become habitual to
the opposite sex and are therefore considered to be typical of it. But
the most important reason for this may be that it is difficult to be able
to express what one thinks or feels at all, whether one is man or
woman. Good novelists and poets still do better than most people, in–
cluding the psychologists; but even novelists and poets only express
themselves
and, so far as the opposite sex is concerned, proceed largely
by projection, and of course by observation, which is behavioristic and
inevitably conventional to some extent, evading the question of an in–
ner life. And most artists have been men anyway and have invented
and re-invented women for the world and for themselves, without con–
sultation. Artistically women have been less articulate and their educa–
tion has often encouraged them to reticence and duplicity.
It
is not
surprising that with so little to go on in the way of honest and unaided
documents, Freud should have left the "thinking" female of my genera–
tion with an odd picture of herself. In fact he often induced in women
a double guilt: that as civilized human beings they were sexually sub–
standard anyway and, since sex was phallic, that they were only second–
class males. (Adler's
masculine
protest is really the same thing.)
This may sound unfair: as if I were attributing the garbled no–
tions of the newspapers and of the unanalyzed to the founder of psycho–
analysis. But surely the enormous importance given by Freud to the
castration complex is a sign of his inability to think in any but mas–
culine terms, that is, lop-sidedly. Simone de Beauvoir and others have
produced good evidence that a more common female preoccupation is
fear of penetration, of
damage
in general, which mayor may not be
directly sexual.
These Freudian mechanisms are very mechanistic. The dominant
ideologies of our time which claim to tell us about the ,nature of human
