Freud Hoisted by His Own Mechanism

Projection and Penis Envy: Freud Hoisted by His Own Mechanism

Freud’s theory of penis envy has long been the subject of feminist critique. Karen Horney famously challenged it with the notion of womb envy, arguing that men, confronted by women's central role in reproduction, projected their own sense of lack. But while Horney’s intervention was a powerful reversal, there may be a deeper irony embedded within Freud’s own theory — one that destabilises penis envy from within, rather than opposing it from without.

In psychoanalysis, projection is a defence mechanism: a way for the ego to manage unacceptable desires or anxieties by attributing them to someone else. What cannot be admitted internally is displaced externally. But what if Freud’s theory of penis envy is itself a projection? Not of his patients, but of Freud himself — or more precisely, of the patriarchal unconscious in which he was embedded.

Consider what penis envy is meant to explain: the girl's supposed sense of anatomical inferiority, her turn away from the mother, and her psychic reorientation toward the father. But the core assumption — that women experience lack in relation to male anatomy — reveals more about the theorist’s perspective than the subject’s. Freud identifies the phallus with power, centrality, agency — and then diagnoses the absence of those social values in the female body as psychological lack. But the projection here may not belong to the patient.

In fact, we can read the theory itself as an enactment of the very mechanism it theorises. What if Freud’s own discomfort — with women’s reproductive centrality, with the mother’s primacy in the child’s early life, with the male’s relative dispensability in the biological order of things — was displaced onto the female subject, who is then made to carry the envy that actually belongs to the theoriser? In short, penis envy may not be a discovery but a symptom.

This is not to say Freud was disingenuous. Quite the opposite: the brilliance of psychoanalysis lies in its power to reveal the unconscious investments even of its own authors. But when the explanatory mechanism turns back on the theory itself, we should take note. Here, Freud’s projection becomes self-reflexive. Penis envy may not merely be outdated or patriarchal — it may be a textbook example of what Freud described best: the mind’s capacity to see in the other what it cannot bear to see in itself.

Freud, Projection, and the Irony of Penis Envy

Freud’s notion of penis envy has long drawn fire, particularly from feminist thinkers like Karen Horney, who countered it with the idea of womb envy — the idea that men may feel envious of women’s capacity to gestate and give birth. But beyond counter-theories, there is a deeper irony hiding within Freud’s own conceptual arsenal. What if penis envy is not simply a misreading of female psychology, but a textbook case of projection?

Freud defined projection as a psychological defence mechanism in which an individual attributes their own unacceptable desires or impulses to someone else. If so, his theory of penis envy may reflect an unconscious displacement: not a discovery about women’s inner lives, but a revelation of Freud’s own — or more broadly, patriarchal — anxieties about male insufficiency in the reproductive process.

Biologically speaking, the male role in reproduction is brief and indirect, while the female role is prolonged, embodied, and central. In a symbolic economy that equates power with generativity, this asymmetry may generate envy — the very thing Freud attributed to women. His theory of penis envy thus reads, from this perspective, like a projection of masculine vulnerability. The penis is framed as the universal signifier of power precisely where it is most threatened — in comparison to the womb.

This is not just a matter of turning Freud’s terms against him. It is a demonstration that his own diagnostic tools may expose flaws in his theoretical edifice. The theory of projection, developed to illuminate the operations of the unconscious, becomes a mirror in which the theory of penis envy appears less as objective insight and more as ideology in disguise.

This revision doesn't merely reject Freud's view or invert it — it shows that the logic of psychoanalysis itself undermines one of its foundational myths. Projection, it seems, may be more powerful — and more revealing — than Freud realised.