Freud considered that in normal female development penis envy transformed into the wish for a man and/or a baby.

Karl Abraham differentiated two types of adult women in whom penis envy remained intense as the wish-fulfilling and the vindictive types: The former were dominated by fantasies of having or becoming a penis—as with the singing/dancing/performing women who felt that in their acts they magically incorporated the (parental) phallus. The latter sought revenge on the male through humiliation or deprivation (whether by removing the man from the penis or the penis from the man).