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ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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Neither of the Freuds' correspondences give direct proof to sup–
port the claim that his 1925 paper is to his daughter's second analysis
what "A Child Is Being Beaten" was to her first-that is, a partial
report, set in a larger frame - but the evidence of the paper itself is
very compelling. In "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomi–
cal Distinction Between the Sexes," Freud elaborated on the devel–
opmental differences between girls and boys that he had first sug–
gested in "A Child Is Being Beaten." But he emphasized that a young
woman's "masculinity complex," or envy for the penis, disturbs her
relations with her mother and, indirectly, her siblings. "Even after
penis-envy has abandoned its true object, it continues to exist: by an
easy displacement, it persists in the character trait ofjealousy." This
development, Freud notes, was not apparent to him when he wrote
"A Child Is Being Beaten." Then he had not seen that a female child
holds her mother responsible for her lack of a penis: that she can feel
jealous "of another child on the ground that her mother is fonder of it
than of her" (and this child can be transformed into one of the
anonymous boys beaten in her beating fantasy); and that the mother
herself can be an object of jealousy when the female child comes to
hope for a child - a "penis-child" - by her father.
The little girl's transition to love of her father from love of her
mother was Freud's focus in the essay:
She gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for
a child: and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a
love object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The
girl has turned into a little woman.
If
I am to credit a single
analytic instance, this new situation can give rise to physical sen–
sations which would have to be regarded as a premature awaken–
ing of her female genital apparatus. When the girl's attachment
to her father comes to grief later on and has to be abandoned, it
may give place to an identification with him and the girl may
thus return to her masculinity complex and perhaps remain fix–
ated in it.
In these passages from Freud's essay, many of the themes of
Anna Freud's "honorable inner life" (as she jokingly called it) are
adumbrated: her envy of her brothers and her father; her anger at
her mother, who was fonder of her sister Sophie; the early-awakened
genital sensations related to masturbation; her jealousy of her
mother and Tante Minna as objects of her father's love ; and her
identification with her father. Freud's hypothesis that a jealous girl
