Freud was no friend of the clitoris. Freudian theory holds that grown women who derive their sexual satisfaction from their clitoris are stuck in a childlike state. This “phallic” phase is supposed to end at puberty, when a woman embraces her proper role as a passive, feminine being. “With the change to femininity,” he wrote in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, “the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.”
