How do a girl's early relationships with her mother and father influence the development of her sexuality and her capacity to sustain stable love relationships? Of particular importance in this context are her identification with her mother, her mother's attitude toward her own femininity, and the girl's turning toward her father as a new love object.
In his book Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (1980), Otto Kernberg examines the role of early object relations and Oedipal conflicts in the development of female sexuality, drawing on the concepts of French psychoanalysts, particularly Braunschweig and Fain. He writes:
“ The little girl and the little boy thus have to pass through various developmental stages as part of their road to identifying with adult genitality.
For the little girl, the lack of direct stimulation of her genital erotism in the early relation with mother, and, above all, the mother’s conflicts over the value of her own genitals and genital functions in the broadest sense would bring about an inhibited psychosexual development which is then secondarily reinforced by the development of penis envy and the repression of sexual competitiveness with the oedipal mother. However, the mother’s depreciation of men and her little boy’s genitals may radically alter the sexual perceptions and conflicts of her children of both sexes.”
In this context, Otto Kernberg draws attention to how a mother's attitude toward her own femininity influences the development of her daughter's bodily and sexual sense of self. The mother's conflicts may make it more difficult for the girl to accept her own sexuality and render her identification with her mother more conflicted.
“For the French authors, the little girls’ genitality, in contrast to the socially reinforced “public display” of male genitality in little boys’ pride in their penis, is private—she is alone in the realm of her sexual development. Under these circumstances, her silent and secret unconscious hope resides in turning from mother to father and in her intuitive longing for the paternal penis, which, in penetrating the vagina, would eventually recreate the affirmation of vaginal genitality and of female sexuality in general”.
Otto Kernberg views the girl's turning toward her father as an expression of her hope for recognition of her own femininity beyond the primary relationship with her mother. The sexual imagery in this description belongs to the realm of unconscious Oedipal fantasy.
“Braunschweig and Fain suggest that, because the road of female sexual development is lonelier and more secretive, it is more courageous than the little boy’s, whose genitality is for various reasons stimulated by both parents. Perhaps because under optimal circumstances the little girl has had to change the first erotic object in turning from mother to father, and in the process has had to move from pregenital to genital developments earlier more definitely and in a lonely way, the adult woman has a potentially greater courage and capacity for heterosexual commitment than the adult man.
In a different context, Altman (1977) has pointed out that, in contrast to the permanence of the first object in men, the change of object in women may be one important source of the generally greater ease women have in committing themselves to a stable love relation. Men would be inclined to eternally search for the ideal mother and would be more prone to reactivate pregenital and genital fears and conflicts in their relations with women, which predisposes them to escape from abiding commitments. Women, having already renounced their first object, would be more able to commit themselves to a man who is willing to establish a full genital and “paternal” relationship with them”.
Otto Kernberg views the girl's turning toward her father as an expression of her hope for recognition of her own femininity beyond the primary relationship with her mother. The sexual imagery in this description belongs to the realm of unconscious Oedipal fantasy.
“An additional crucial factor in women’s capacity for commitment may be their concern for the stability of care and protection of their young, involving biological, and psychosocial determinants, mostly the identification with maternal functions and related sublimatory superego values (Blum, 1976)”.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy