at girls and women do not have penises, and this leads the boy to believe that the girls were somehow denied them, or they had them taken away. Freud concluded that this created a sense of anxiety in boys because they are afraid of losing their penises. Freud labeled this the Castration Complex. He also argued that girls blame their mothers for our "inferior anatomy," and therefore turn our affections to our fathers in an effort to attain the desired object. By contrast, boys desire to marry their mothers and replace their fathers. Freudian theory labels this the Oedipus Complex (named after the Greek myth about Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother). When they learn that they cannot "possess" their mothers because their rivals are bigger and stronger, they fear that their fathers will punish them for feeling this way by castrating them. Boys get over the Oedipus Complex rather quickly and they seek a new love interest and identify with the father. Girls identify with their mothers reluctantly, because this identification does not help us achieve what we are wishing for during the phallic stage. The critics of Freud’s ideas about female development can be divided into two groups. The first group questions whether or not these psychological events actually take place. Because these are psychologically developed and not physically developed, there is no way to tell if they actually exist because they cannot be observed directly. Since there is no proof or test of the unconscious process, or even of the unconscious, some argue that these theories can not be considered scientific. The second group includes a number of Freud’s students. They do not directly attack the psychoanalytic approach but they disagree with the basic Freudian formulation of female development. Dorothy Dinnerstein, a psychologist who has written about the development of gender roles, says: I am disturbed, like the other radical c...
