On Passivity.

In "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (Freud [14]), Freud only explicitly mentions the term "passivity" once - with respect to what he terms "feminine masochism" - a derivative of primary masochism, and a form that he had already discussed at length in "A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]). One of the complications with discussing Freud's terminology is that there isn't masculine or feminine passivity as such in Freud, but "activity" and "passivity", and then Freud slides "masculine" and "feminine" over those terms, sometime equating them, and sometimes not. Whereas in this paper, Freud falls back on anatomical explanations of sexual difference ("the repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex" (Freud [19], p. 253), only two years before he eschewed biological determinism: "I would only like to emphasize that we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology" (Freud [18]/Steiner [35] p.380). (Freud [14], p. 163) As he did in 'A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]), so in the 1924 paper Freud explains the genesis of "feminine masochism" in terms of Oedipal conflicts, specifically the repressed guilt and thrill of incestual Oedipal wishes. [Extracted from the article]