Freud’s Influence on Femininity and Masculinity: Origins of Gender Terms

Few thinkers have shaped how we talk about gender as profoundly, and as controversially, as Sigmund Freud. Long before “gender studies” became an academic field, Freud was already using the terms femininity and masculinity in ways that pushed them beyond simple biology into the realm of the mind. He argued these qualities were not fixed at birth but constructed through a complex psychological journey. His ideas remain a starting point for almost every modern conversation on gender, whether scholars are building on them or dismantling them piece by piece.

Where the terms came from: a quick backdrop 🔗

Before Freud, “masculine” and “feminine” were treated mostly as biological labels tied to anatomy. The late nineteenth century, however, saw a wave of European sexologists, embryologists, and physicians beginning to question that neat division. Researchers like Wilhelm Fliess and Havelock Ellis argued that every human body carried traces of both sexes, an idea borrowed from embryology. Freud absorbed these influences and converted them into a psychological theory. He was particularly interested in why femininity, in his words, remained “a riddle,” and he made it a lifelong intellectual concern, returning to it in lectures and essays from 1905 right up to the 1930s.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and psychosexual development 🔗

At the heart of Freud’s framework is the idea that personality, including gender identity, develops through a series of psychosexual stages. First outlined in his 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the theory proposed that a child’s personality and gender identity are shaped through stages driven by libidinal energy. These stages, oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital, were said to determine how a person would later experience desire, identity, and relationships.

The phallic stage and the Oedipus complex 🔗

For Freud, the most decisive stage for gender was the phallic stage, occurring roughly between the ages of three and six. This is when the famous Oedipus complex appears. Boys, he claimed, develop unconscious desires for their mother and rivalrous feelings toward their father, before eventually identifying with the father out of “castration anxiety.” Girls take a different route. Freud proposed that they experience what he called penis envy, turn away from the mother, and direct affection toward the father, eventually replacing the wish for a penis with the wish for a child.

The latency and genital stages 🔗

After the turbulence of early childhood, Freud believed children entered a calmer latency stage where sexual impulses were sublimated into school, sport, and same-sex friendships. He thought this period quietly reinforced gender roles by encouraging children to gravitate toward same-sex peer groups. The final genital stage in adolescence then integrated earlier development into mature adult sexuality, the success of which depended on how well earlier stages were resolved.

The concept of bisexuality in Freud’s work 🔗

One of Freud’s most radical ideas, and one often forgotten in popular summaries, was his theory of psychic bisexuality. He did not mean bisexuality in the modern sense of sexual orientation. He meant something deeper: that every human mind carries both masculine and feminine elements, regardless of biological sex.

As early as 1897, in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud was already exploring the masculine and feminine as a dichotomy approached from two complementary perspectives, that of bisexuality and that of psychosexual development. He developed the idea further in his 1931 essay “Feminine Sexuality” and in his famous 1933 lecture titled “Femininity,” part of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Across these works he maintained that bisexuality involved “a more or less harmonious” synthesis of masculine and feminine traits within every individual.

Freud inherited the theory of primordial bisexuality from the embryologists and sexologists of his time and made it the bedrock of his psychoanalytic framework. It allowed him to argue that no one is purely masculine or purely feminine. A boy could carry feminine wishes, a girl could carry masculine ones, and adult identity was the result of how these competing currents were balanced or repressed.

Psychoanalysis and the making of gender identities 🔗

If everyone begins with a bisexual disposition, why do most people end up identifying clearly as masculine or feminine? Freud’s answer was that culture, family, and unconscious conflict force a resolution. He envisioned the masculine and feminine as two currents constantly competing within the psyche, with antagonism between them shaping identity.

The antagonism between masculine and feminine 🔗

Freud described femininity as something that could only be approached through what it was not. In his framework, only masculinity is identifiable, while femininity can only be understood in terms of the negative. This negative definition meant that femininity, for Freud, was always at risk of being unsettled by leftover impulses from earlier, pre-Oedipal phases of development. The result was a model in which masculine and feminine were not parallel and equal, but locked in an uneven struggle inside every person.

Identity through repression and identification 🔗

How does a child become “a man” or “a woman” in Freud’s terms? Through repression of the opposite-sex currents and identification with the same-sex parent. Boys repress their feminine impulses and identify with the father. Girls are expected to repress their early “masculine” activity, particularly clitoral pleasure, and transition into what Freud considered mature femininity centered on motherhood. The superego, Freud’s name for the internal moral judge, also takes on a gendered character, formed largely through the child’s relationship with the father. This, as one analysis notes, provided the germ of a theory of the patriarchal organization of culture, transmitted from one generation to the next through the construction of masculinity.

Criticisms of Freud’s approach 🔗

Freud’s gender theory was groundbreaking, but it has drawn intense criticism since the mid-twentieth century. Three lines of critique are especially important.

Femininity equated with passivity 🔗

The most cited problem is Freud’s habit of linking femininity to passivity and masculinity to activity. He has often been criticised for his equation of femininity with passivity. In a 1925 essay he even wrote that women “oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own,” a remark documented by the British Psychological Society in its discussion of Freud and penis envy. By tying gender to a passive-active personality dimension, Freud risked turning a cultural stereotype into a psychological law. Feminist scholars argue that this framing helped justify the social roles women were already confined to, casting them as biologically suited to receptivity, dependence, and reproduction rather than autonomous action.

Penis envy and the male standard 🔗

Few of Freud’s ideas have aged as poorly as penis envy. The very framework assumed that the male body was the default and the female body a kind of lack. Karen Horney, one of Freud’s own followers, broke with him on exactly this point. As Wikipedia summarises, Horney is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud’s theory of penis envy, tracing differences between men and women to society and culture rather than biology. She proposed that women did not envy the penis itself but the social power and privilege attached to it, and introduced the counter-concept of womb envy to describe men’s unconscious envy of women’s capacity to bear life.

Existentialist and feminist re-readings 🔗

Simone de Beauvoir mounted another influential critique. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Beauvoir’s misgivings about Freud stem from a feminist suspicion that women are understood on the basis of a masculine model, together with an existentialist conviction that human beings define themselves through their own actions rather than a predetermined fate. Later psychoanalytic feminists, including Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin, have continued to rework Freud’s ideas, keeping what is useful, particularly his insight into the unconscious, while rejecting the assumption that anatomy is destiny.

Heteronormativity and cultural blind spots 🔗

A further criticism is that Freud’s developmental model is deeply heteronormative. It treats heterosexual maturity as the goal of psychosexual development and assumes a two-parent, gendered family structure. As Wikipedia notes in its entry on penis envy, some feminists argue that Freud’s developmental theory denies women a mature sexuality independent of men. For students of gender today, this is a serious limitation, because identities and family structures are far more diverse than Freud’s Vienna allowed him to imagine.

Why Freud still matters in gender studies 🔗

Even after a century of critique, Freud cannot simply be discarded. His vocabulary of masculinity, femininity, bisexuality, identification, and the unconscious continues to frame how psychologists, sociologists, and gender theorists think. He was among the first to insist that gender is not a simple biological given but a psychological achievement, shaped by family relationships, cultural expectations, and inner conflict. That single move opened the door for later thinkers to argue that if gender is constructed, it can also be questioned, expanded, and rewritten. Reading Freud today, then, is less about agreeing with him and more about understanding the foundation he laid, and what we have built differently on top of it.

What do you think? Does Freud’s idea that everyone carries both masculine and feminine elements still feel relevant to how we understand gender today, or does it rest on assumptions that no longer hold up? And how much of what he called “femininity” do you think reflected the psyche, and how much simply reflected the society he lived in?

References

1. https://gender.study/psychology-of-gender/freud-psychosexual-development-impact-gender/
2. https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/masculinityfemininity
3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bisexuality
4. https://science.jrank.org/pages/10172/Men-Masculinity-Freud.html
5. https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/sigmund-freud-and-penis-envy-failure-courage
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney
7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-psychoanalysis/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy