psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

, phallic woman is a concept to describe a woman with the symbolic attributes of the phallus. More generally, it describes any woman possessing traditionally masculine characteristics.

Phallic mother

Freud considered that at the

phallic stage In Freudian psychoanalysis, the phallic stage is the third stage of psychosexual development, spanning the ages of three to six years, wherein the infant's libido (desire) centers upon their genitalia as the erogenous zone. When children become ...

of early childhood development children of both sexes attribute possession of a penis to the mother—a belief the loss of which helps precipitate the

castration complex The castration complex is a concept developed by Sigmund Freud, first presented in 1908, initially as part of his theorisation of the transition in early childhood development from the polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality to the ‘infan ...

. Thereafter males may seek

fetishistic A fetish (derived from the French , which comes from the Portuguese , and this in turn from Latin , 'artificial' and , 'to make') is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over othe ...

substitutes in women for the lost penis in the form of high heels, earrings or long hair to alleviate the castrative threat—terrifying phallic women such as witches (with their broomsticks) representing the failure of such substitutes to cover the underlying anxiety. The female, whose love (in Freud's view) was originally "directed to her ''phallic'' mother", may thereafter either turn to her father for love, or may return to an identification with the original phallic mother in a neurotic development. The phallic mother ''can'' be (though need not necessarily be) an actively castrative figure, stifling her children by pre-empting all room for autonomous action.

Phallus girl

Rather than seeking or identifying with the phallic mother,

libido Libido (; colloquial: sex drive) is a person's overall sexual drive or desire for sexual activity. Libido is influenced by biological, psychological, and social factors. Biologically, the sex hormones and associated neurotransmitters that act u ...

may instead be directed at the figure that has been termed the phallus-girl. For the male, the phallus girl may be represented by a younger (perhaps boyish) girl, in whom he can find an image of his own adolescent self. For the female, such a position may either entail a submissive merger with the male partner (identification with a body-part), or an exhibitionist display of the self as phallus: as Ella Sharpe put it of a dancer, "she was the magical phallus. The dancing was in her".

Soft porn Softcore pornography or softcore porn, is commercial still photography or film that has a pornographic or erotic component but is less sexually graphic and intrusive than hardcore pornography, defined by a lack of visual sexual penetration. Softc ...

marks out the phallus girl through such symbols as whips, bikes and guns; while she also underpins the action heroine such as Ripley or

Lara Croft Lara Croft is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the video game franchise ''Tomb Raider''. She is presented as a highly intelligent and athletic British archaeologist who ventures into ancient tombs and hazardous ruins around th ...

Later developments

The twenty-first century

ladette Lad culture (also the new lad, laddism) was a media-driven, principally British and Irish subculture of the 1990s and early 2000s. The image of the "lad"—or "new lad"—was that of a generally middle class figure espousing attitudes typically at ...

can be seen as a phallic girl—her emphasis on light-hearted, recreational sex serving as a passport to being 'one of the boys'.

Artistic analogues

* Picasso in the interwar years produced many paintings of women with phallic attributes. * Buffy the Vampire Slayer demonstrates an ambivalent relationship to her phallic power as slayer/staker.

References

{{Reflist, 2}

External links

Phallic woman
Freudian psychology Human penis Psychoanalytic theory Women and psychology