Irene Matthis - Dialogues On Sexuality, Gender and Psychoanalysis - Karnac Books (2004)

DIALOGUES ON
SEXUALITY, GENDER,
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
DIALOGUES ON
SEXUALITY, GENDER,
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
edited by
Iréne Matthis
KARNAC
KARNAC
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In honour of Joyce McDougall
CONTENTS
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ix

PREFACE xiii
CHAPTER ONE
Dialogues on sexuality and gender
Iréne Matthis 1
CHAPTER TWO
Freud and female sexualities
Joyce McDougall 23
CHAPTER THREE
Some observations on female sexuality
Julia Kristeva 41
CHAPTER FOUR
Phallacies of binary reasoning: drive beyond gender
Paul Verhaeghe 53
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER FIVE
The difference between gender and sexual difference
Juliet Mitchell 67
CHAPTER SIX
Gender and sexual difference
Colette Chiland 79
CHAPTER SEVEN
From femininity to finitude:
Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again
Toril Moi 93
CHAPTER EIGHT
Femininity theory, theories of women,
or feminist theory?
Ebba Witt-Brattström 137
CHAPTER NINE
Revisiting the riddle of sex:
an intersubjective view of masculinity and femininity
Jessica Benjamin 145
CHAPTER TEN
The economy of freedom
Gisela Kaplan 173
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Beyond sexual difference:
clinical individuality and same-sex cross-generation
relations in the creation of feminine and masculine
Nancy J. Chodorow 181
INDEX 205
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
JESSICA BENJAMIN, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, is

a supervisor and faculty member at the New York University
Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is
a founding board member of the International Association for
Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, member of the edi-
torial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an associate editor of
the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of three
books: The Bonds of Love (1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995), and
Shadow of the Other (1998).
COLETTE CHILAND is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst at the Paris Psy-

choanalytic Society, and professor emeritus at René Descartes Uni-
versity of Paris. She is the author of six books and co-author and
editor of fourteen books and five special issues of journals. She has
also authored some 200 papers. Some of these books and papers
have been published in English. Her most recent paper, “The
psychoanalyst and the transsexual patient”, appeared in February
2000 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
ix
x EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
NANCY J. CHODOROW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in

Oakland, California, a faculty member of the San Francisco Psycho-
analytic Institute, and clinical faculty, Department of Psychology,
University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Repro-
duction of Mothering (1978, 2nd. edition, 1999), Feminism and Psycho-
analytic Theory (1989), Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities (1994),
and The Power of Feelings (1999). She is North American Book
Review Editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and an
Editorial Associate of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
GISELA KAPLAN, originally from Berlin, is now research professor at

the University of New England, Australia, in two disciplinary
fields: social science (sociology, education, and psychology) and
biological science (ethology) in the Faculties of Science and Educa-
tion. She has published over 150 papers as well as seven books in
the social sciences, including Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging,
Freedom (1989), Contemporary Western European Feminism (1992), The
Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women’s Movement 1950s–1990s
(1996), and nine books on animal behaviour (orang-utans, birds,
animal communication, etc.). Her latest book (with Lesley Rogers),
is Gene Worship (2003).
JULIA KRISTEVA is a professor at Paris 7 (linguistics and literature), a

psychoanalyst, and a prolific writer. She is the recipient of many
international awards. Some of her latest books published in English
are The Female Genius, Vol. 1: Hannah Arendt (2001) and The Female
Genius, Vol. 2: Melanie Klein (2002).
IRÉNE MATTHIS is professor of psychoanalysis and assistant professor

of clinical neuroscience at Umeå University in Sweden. She is a
training analyst and teacher at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Insti-
tute (IPA) and is the Scandinavia Co-ordinator for IPA–COWAP.
She is a Board Member of the International Neuro-Psychoanalysis
Society and editor of the Bulletin Section of the international jour-
nal Neuro-Psychoanalysis. She is the author of several books and
papers, including, in Swedish: Det omedvetnas arkeologi [The Ar-
chaeology of the Unconscious] (1992); and Den tänkande kroppen
[The Thinking Body] (1997); and, in English, “Sketch for a
Metapsychology of Affects”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xi
(2000); “Finger-twisting and Cracked Voices: The Hysterical Symp-

tom Revisited”, in D. E. Scharff (Ed.), The Psychoanalytic Century:
Freud’s Legacy for the Future (2001); and “Strangebody”, in M.
Alizade (Ed.), The Embodied Female (2002); she also co-edited, with I.
Szecsödy, On Freud’s Couch (1998).
JOYCE MCDOUGALL, born in New Zealand, received her psychoana-

lytic training in London and Paris, where she has been a training
analyst since 1961. She has published several books, including Plea
for a Measure of Abnormality (1978), Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and
Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage (1982), Theaters of the Body: A Psy-
choanalytic View of Psychosomatic Phenomena (1989), and The Many
Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality (1995).
Co-author with S. Lebovici, she has also written Dialogue with
Sammy (1961, new revised edition 1984). She has made numerous
contributions to American, Brazilian, English, French, German,
Scandinavian, and Spanish psychoanalytic journals.
JULIET MITCHELL is professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies in

the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Jesus
College. She is a Full Member of the British Psychoanalytical Soci-
ety and the International Psychoanalytical Association. Her most
recent books are Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the
Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000) and Sib-
lings, Sex and Violence (2003).
TORIL MOI is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance

Studies at Duke University, North Carolina. She is the author of
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; second edi-
tion, 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
(1993), and What Is a Woman? (2000) and the editor of The Kristeva
Reader (1986) and French Feminist Thought (1987). She is currently
working on a book on Ibsen and planning more work on feminist
theory.
PAUL VERHAEGHEis full professor at the University of Gent, Belgium,

and head of the department for psychoanalysis and consulting
psychology. He has published over 100 papers as well as four
books: Does The Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s
xii EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
Feminine (1997), Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and

Desire (1999), Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (2001), and On
Being Normal and Other Disorders (2004).
EBBA WITT-BRATTSTRÖM is professor of comparative literature and

gender studies at Södertörn University College, Stockholm. She is
Swedish editor of Volumes 2 and 3 of Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria
[Nordic Women´s Literary History] (1993, 1996), and volume editor
of The New Woman and the Aesthetic Opening: Unlocking Gender in
Twentieth Century Texts (2004). She is the author of Moa Martinson:
Skrift och drift i trettiotalet [Moa Martinson: Writing and Instinct in
the Thirties] (1988), Ediths jag. Edith Södergran och modernismens
födelse (Edith´s Self: Edith Södergran and the Birth of Modernism,
1997), and a book on feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature, Ur
könets mörker. Litteraturanalyser [Out of the Darkness of Sex: Liter-
ary Analyses] (1993, 2003). She has edited books on, among others,
Julia Kristeva (1990) and Lou Andreas-Salomé (1995). Her publica-
tions in English include “Maternal Abject, Fascist Apocalypse, and
Daughter Separation in Contemporary Swedish Novels”, in Writ-
ing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary
Europe, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith (1997),
and “Towards a Feminist Genealogy of Modernism: The Narcissis-
tic Turn in Lou Andreas-Salomé and Edith Södergran”, in Gender–
Power–Text: Nordic Culture in the Twentieth Century, edited by
Helena Forsås-Scott (forthcoming 2004).
PREFACE
I
t seems that human beings are never fully satisfied with
their lives. One way of dealing with this fundamental sense of
dissatisfaction is to look for its sources, its roots: in short, an
explanation. In this light, is it fair to say that femininity theories
are created to “make sense” of women’s dissatisfactions and frus-
tration? Freud, reflecting on his experience with women a century
ago, made sense of women’s predicament through his theory of
the “missing penis”, an explanation that was meaningful at the
time to a great many people, women as well as men. Today, we
usually regard this theory as a reflection of time-bound prejudices
that prevailed in the specific environment of turn-of-the-century
Vienna.
But, rather than merely dismissing yesterday’s theories as
prejudices, we need to explore and investigate the new theories
that are taking the place of the traditional models, and, conse-
quently, to question our own prejudiced opinions and notions. One
pleasant, and exciting, way of doing so is to gather people with
different perspectives and allow them the space and the time to
talk with each other rather than merely to each other. This was one
of the ideas behind the Stockholm Conference on Sexuality and
xiii
xiv PREFACE
Gender (30–31 August 2002), and in this book you will be able to
partake in the dialogues that were born out of this gathering.
The conference was organized by COWAP (Committee on
Women and Psychoanalysis), a commission created in 1998 by the
International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). From the begin-
ning, the main purpose of COWAP was to study and discuss
“women issues”, but slowly it shifted towards including “men’s
issues” as well. The idea of having the first European COWAP
Conference in Sweden was planted by Joan Raphael-Leff, the first
chair of COWAP, in the autumn of 2000. When Mariam Alizade
took over the chair in 2001, she continued to strongly support the
realization of the project.
With speakers such as Jessica Benjamin, Colette Chiland, Nancy
Chodorow, Gisela Kaplan, Julia Kristeva, Joyce McDougall, Juliet
Mitchell, Toril Moi, Paul Verhaeghe, and Ebba Witt-Brattström,
there was never any doubt that the difficult questions of sexuality
and gender, of femininity and masculinity, would be analysed and
discussed in new and stimulating ways. Old concepts were dis-
mantled and new ideas brought forward. A conference so rich in
ideas calls for documentation, and it became necessary to collect
and publish the (reworked) contributions in the form of this vol-
ume. The COWAP conference on “Sexuality and Gender” was
created with the conscious intent of bringing different ideas to bear
on each other, in order to promote further research into this area
that is so important to all of us. We were not necessarily looking for
consensus, but for thoughtful elaboration. It is dialogue that makes
us move forward.
The conference depended on the volunteer work of many peo-
ple. I want to thank all of those who generously made their contri-
bution as chairs of panels and discussion groups, and as hosts of
the groups: Mariam Alizade, Giovanna Ambrosio, Cecilia Annell,
Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Svein Haugsgjerd, Eva Hurtig, Sonja
Härdelin, Suzanne Kaplan, Magnus Kihlbom, Pirjo Lantz, Johan
Norman, Lars-Göran Nygren, Joan Raphael-Leff, Beth Seelig,
Mikael Sundén, and Maria Yassa.
The conference was organized with the help of a local commit-
tee appointed by the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society and the
Swedish Psychoanalytical Association. Their devoted labour dur-
ing the year that preceded the conference was decisive in making
PREFACE xv
the conference a success, and I warmly thank Christina Flordh,

Daniela Montelatici Prawitz, Lena Necander-Redell, Agneta
Solberger, and Mikael Sundén. Also, I am deeply grateful to Paula
Barkay, at the Anna Freud Centre in London, whose knowledge
and experience was invaluable.
Iréne Matthis
DIALOGUES ON
SEXUALITY, GENDER,
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
CHAPTER ONE
Dialogues on sexuality and gender
Iréne Matthis
T
heory and practice are not always in harmony with one
another, although the former is created and applied in order
to achieve precisely that. There is a conflict between reality
as we experience it and the theories that we apply to it. In the
special case of “sexuality and gender”, we find that if we—whether
women or men—fail to conform to the (general) theory about what
we are supposed to be (female or male), it is usually we who are in
for trouble, and not the theory. This may seem unfair to us, but as
humans we can neither understand nor make sense of our lives,
nor exchange ideas about it, without having access to a theory of
some kind.
It follows that there are problems inherent in concept forma-
tion. Concepts are created at an abstract level to give us not the
details, but an overview that our individual and limited experience
cannot provide. But as soon as the concepts are applied to indi-
vidual material—for example, at an ordinary, clinical level in psy-
choanalysis—they seem to become misleading. Why is that?
As abstract concepts—that is, as part of a metapsychology—
they make universalizing claims. That is exactly why we value and
need them. They seem to offer us a bird’s-eye view and, thus,
1
2 IRÉNE MATTHIS
insights that we could not otherwise have. At the same time, they
structure the whole field in such a way that we feel there is a law,
or at least a rule guiding the world.
Applied to a real situation, however, this claim to universality
may become problematic, when that which is unique and singular
is judged and categorized according to a universal rule that might
not be pertinent in the particular case. A patient–analyst relation-
ship, for example, or a novel written in specific historical circum-
stances, may very well be mistreated and misjudged if we treat it in
accordance with a given rule that we apply without consideration
and thought.
So we find ourselves having to make an impossible choice. We
can choose to maintain the appeal of universal lawfulness by offer-
ing up the uniqueness of the specific case to the demands of
uniformity—or we have to let go of the claim to generalizability
and make do with the truthfulness of each single case. If we choose
the latter, we lose the much-cherished claim to scientific relevance
and the possibility of creating theories by which we can orient
ourselves in the world. In this volume you will find examples of
both tendencies.
For the reader, this may initially create confusion. Nevertheless,
if you are prepared to suspend your desire to hear voices singing in
concert, you may find that you start to enjoy the kind of harmony
created by diverging voices. I have written this introduction in
order to facilitate the reading. It offers a summary of the chapters in
this volume in order of appearance, creating a kind of score for the
reading of the book. This is, of course, a subjective attempt, but it is,
nevertheless, an attempt to be true to the subject under discussion
and to the eternal pursuit of knowledge. We start with Joyce
McDougall.
Freud and female sexualities (Joyce McDougall). There are con-

scious beliefs and manifest behaviours related to gendered sexual-
ity. But equally important are the hidden agendas and sexual
conduct rooted in unconscious fantasies and marked by archaic
and pregenital erotism. This is a theme that has been explored
thoroughly by Joyce McDougall, one of the most important post-
Freudian writers on women and sexuality. Freud’s views on female
DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER 3
sexuality might have been misconstrued, she writes, but he was

one of the first to listen to women, bringing into the open their
unconscious desires and fantasies. It was, indeed, by listening to
them that he reached the initial insights that led him to the concept
of the unconscious.
Joyce McDougall’s contribution, not only to female psychology
but to psychoanalytic thought in a broad sense, is important. She
has, for example, dealt with the three fundamental traumas that
everyone has to suffer: the fact that there are others; the fact that
you can belong only to one sex; and, finally, the fact that you are
doomed to die. The way in which we deal with these traumas will
colour all later events in our lives. This idea, which Joyce
McDougall presented in her book The Many Faces of Eros (1995), is
also important in relation to male and female psychology, and the
theme is elaborated by Toril Moi in her contribution to this volume.
Moi relates it to the question of castration, the central point in both
Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of sexual difference and femininity,
although these theories differ in many other respects.
In “Freud and Female Sexualities” (note the plural), Joyce
McDougall presents the Freudian background and outlines the
revolution in social representations of sexuality and sexual rela-
tionships that we have witnessed during the last forty years. Al-
though we talk of a sexual liberation, sexuality is in many respects
as conflictual as it was before. Men’s fear of women, which Joyce
McDougall discerns both in Freud’s writings on women and in
male analysands today, may perhaps be a projection onto the
woman of the man’s fears of his own inner space and longings,
fears related to unconscious pregenital fantasies. Men’s projection
of their own frightening ideas and longings is a line of thought that
recurs in Jessica Benjamin’s chapter in this volume, but dealt with
from quite a different angle.
The ideas produced by these projections will, of course, be
distorted. What Freud saw in the girl was very much determined
by what the little boy wanted to see, or what he feared to appre-
hend. Thus Freud’s metaphors became phallocentric, only giving
significance to the clitoris. And the girl’s clitoris, defined as a
diminutive male organ, had to be eliminated as an erogenous zone
in the process of becoming a woman. Blinded by the little boy’s
4 IRÉNE MATTHIS
perspective, Freud missed an aspect that was especially important

to the little girl: the mother–daughter relation. Joyce McDougall
claims that this relationship will define and specify the feminine
body and its erogenous zones as somatopsychic images, relating
mouth and vagina to each other, especially in the early stages. (This
theme is developed further in Kristeva’s contribution.)
Looking back to Freud’s theory of femininity, Joyce McDougall
writes that “[it] is hard to avoid the suspicion that Freud had
elevated Victorian prejudices to the rank of a theory . . .”, and she
gives us an overview of the reasons, cultural and psychological, for
such a phenomenon.
Finally, Joyce McDougall brings into focus the issue of sexual
deviation in women, and especially the question of “perverse
motherhood”. As sexual perversion has usually been identified
with male sexuality, interest and research has been deflected from
the problems of female deviation. Joyce McDougall writes that “not
all mothers are good”—as Freud would have it—and if there is
abuse, “the pattern of abuse goes back three generations or more”.
She gives ample evidence of this and points to the research that
needs to be done in the future on an arena of female sexuality that
we have hardly even started to investigate.
Primary and secondary oedipal phases (Julia Kristeva). The Oedi-

pus complex is, as everyone knows, central to the question of
female psychosexual development. In her contribution, Kristeva
presents a revised interpretation that emphasizes the primary oedi-
pal phase. Like Joyce McDougall, Kristeva claims that there is a
crucial early relationship between the little girl and her mother.
This period is mentioned late in Freud’s writings (Freud, 1931b),
and he describes it as difficult to analyse. For Lacan, it is nothing
but impossible: “it is irreducible by analysis because it eludes the
ascendancy of phallic primacy”.
Kristeva elaborates on the significance of this early relation-
ship between the infant and the mother, viewing it from a perspec-
tive influenced by Laplanche’s idea of “enigmatic signifiers”
(Laplanche, 1987). In these “early, dark ages” of psychosomatic
development, marked especially by orifices (mouth, anus, and
vagina), we discern the basis for the “female position”, which will
become important in the sexual development of men as well as

women, albeit in different ways.
The little girl’s earliest sexuality, based on both a “vaginal–
cloacal mobilization” and a clitoral excitation, becomes structured
as a psychic bisexuality. It is simultaneously passive and active, but
it reveals something even more important than the passive–active
dynamics: an interactive subjectivity is installed, according to
Kristeva. She argues that this pattern is confirmed in the treatment
of adult women, and in her contribution to this volume Jessica
Benjamin develops this theme and furnishes clinical examples.
During this period the girl introjectively installs the seductive
mother in the excited cavity of her body—as an internal represen-
tation. But this psychization of the maternal object needs to be
stabilized by a real link to the mother, who in a symmetrical way
couples with her infant girl. The avatars of this process, Kristeva
argues, can explain “women’s tendency to privilege psychic or
loving representation–idealization over erotic drive excitation”.
Women will tend to find lovers who understand them the way a
mother would, rather than lovers who are partners in desire.
Kristeva claims that due to the anatomical difference between
the sexes, as well as for historical and cultural reasons, the girl’s
later development will become both more fragile and more com-
plex than the boy’s. She goes on to explore this theme, while
emphasizing that she is not out to diminish the structuring role of
phallic authority, but to remind us that it appears in the infant’s
psyche through mediation by the parental seduction stemming
from the first, early phase and thus only adds to something that is
already there.
Kristeva’s hypothesis stresses precisely this: the female posi-
tion, formed during the primary oedipal phase with its emphasis
on internal space and (symbiotic) relationships, is the bedrock of
sexual psychization—much more so than castration anxiety. The
phallic phase will, however, repress these significations, or, rather,
will mask them by a reactional femininity—perhaps the one we see
displayed in today’s beauty magazines.
A psychoanalytic theory of sexuality is always based on “the co-
presence of sexuality with thought, a web of both energy and
meaning”, and the phallic stage becomes the organizer of this
6 IRÉNE MATTHIS
dynamic—in both sexes. There is a phallic pleasure in the access to

language and the functioning of speech and thought, and the
phallus thus becomes the privileged signifier of symbolic law. In
this process, Kristeva believes that the girl is disadvantaged. De-
prived of the penis and devalued by this fact in all patriarchal
societies, she is excluded within the order and finds herself subject
to a “radical strangeness”. Like the man, she is a phallic subject of
speech, but she is also placed in the position of becoming the object
of the father, by falling back not, Kristeva writes, on a passive
position but, rather, on a receptive position related to the original
excitation during the primary oedipal phase.
This is a difficult route, but if the female subject can metabolize
the cavernous receptivity of the primary oedipal phase and man-
age the narcissistic challenge of the secondary oedipal phase,
Kristeva thinks she will have the chance to acquire a maturity that
the man often lacks.
On binary oppositions (Paul Verhaeghe). Kristeva’s writings con-

stitute the springboard for Paul Verhaeghe to bring the all-inclu-
sive issue of dualism and binary reasoning into the discussion. In
Western dualistic thought, where two elements are always op-
posed to one another—nature versus culture, masculinity versus
femininity, primary oedipal versus secondary oedipal, and so on—
a third term or position is required to ground the binary. God has
often had to fulfil this role, and Freud did something of the sort
when he constructed his myth of the primal father.
Verhaeghe claims that this has an ontological effect at the level
of the subject. The subject identifies with the father and believes
this identity to be authentic and substantial (but, of course, it is not:
it is a way of coping with life). However, binary thinking also
implies a mirroring of the one in the other, as when we say that the
psyche mirrors the body. In relation to the third term (e.g. God) the
identification (man is constructed in the image of God) implies a
reduction: man is a lesser “God”; the child is the image of the
father, albeit a lesser form; and so on. This is nothing but a version
of the mirror stage, by which the child acquires an imaginary
identity. Related to gender, Paul Verhaeghe claims, this gives rise
to a particular reading of (the) phallus (see below).
The binary reasoning often induces problematic analogies. The

term “gender”, which implies a constructivistic approach, was
introduced to help solve the problem of biological sex versus
psychosexual identity. It was, however, soon invaded by the same
binary opposition—the division into feminine and masculine iden-
tity—and the same discussion resumed. Paul Verhaeghe maintains
that these analogies—and the list is seemingly endless—are based
on a patriarchal binary way of thinking, where the woman is
usually aligned with nature, the real, drive, body, and so on, while
the man is aligned with culture, the symbolic, psyche, and so on. In
clinical practice, however, these attributions do not stand the test.
For example, women seem more symbolically inclined than men,
who in turn expose more of a drive-ridden sexuality. Nor does
motherhood, which appears to place a strong link between woman
and Nature, stand the test: Verhaeghe has met many mothers who
reject their children or have no interest in them. “The maternal
instinct is a myth, and maternal love is an effect of an obligatory
alienation.” At this point, Paul Verhaeghe’s discussion intersects
with the ideas brought forward by Joyce McDougall in her contri-
bution.
The presumed connection between masculinity and the sym-
bolic is the result of a particular reading of phallus within binary
thinking. It is viewed as the grounding third term in gender dual-
ism, based on the presence or absence of a penis. This was clearly
so for both Freud and the early Lacan. This concentration on the
phallic is not very helpful either for men or for women. It belongs
in the field of psychopathology. What we find in it is the repetition
compulsion, and Verhaeghe moves on to develop his ideas on this
subject.
He begins by discussing the concept of drive in Freud’s theory,
and especially the partial drives, directly linked to sexuality and
focusing on various bodily orifices. The driving force is always
heading towards a previous state, but the crux is that there seem to
be two opposite states. Thus, Freud introduced his concept of the
life and the death drives, Eros and Thanatos. Eros aims for synthe-
sis and the symbolic, associating what is separate and aiming at
(phallic) fusion and wholeness. This goal is, however, never
reached, because of the presence of a drive in the opposite direc-
8 IRÉNE MATTHIS
tion: the death drive. This drive works in silence, beyond the
symbolic, and without any connection to the signifier. It scatters
the wholeness and explodes into an infinite universe.
Paul Verhaeghe relates this opposition to the question of ori-
gins: more specifically, to the origins of sexually differentiated life
forms. Asexual reproduction proceeds by cell division, meiosis, and
it can be seen as representing the aim of Eros: eternal life. But with
the introduction of sexual reproduction, death becomes a structural
necessity. The individual must die for the species to survive. In
asexual reproduction death is an accident.
According to Paul Verhaeghe, the drive antinomy is fundamen-
tal, and the gender oppositions are but a consequence of this.
Similarly, in the case of psychosexual development, the child is
born with an innate tendency to attach to the other as closely as
possible, incorporating as many parts as possible of the other
(Eros) and thus trying to bridge the gap caused by birth. After a
while the other diffusional tendency comes to the fore, and now
individuation and striving for a life of one’s own dominate the
picture (Thanatos). It is not by chance that this happens at the same
time as language is acquired and the child starts using “I”.
In this scheme, Verhaeghe suggests that gender and sexuality
are attempts to regain the original Eros fusion. They are thus only
expressing a more fundamental element of drive, where failure is
structurally built in. Aristophanes’ well-known fable of the original
androgynous being that was bisected by Zeus can be understood
as a description of this situation. Loss of eternal life is the loss of an
original wholeness. At the same time this implies a gender differ-
entiation, and when phrased in phallic terms the original loss is
secondarily interpreted as a castration: a perpetual repetition of
illusionary (Eros) longings!
In this scenario, the female who seems to have lost her male part
needs it in order to become whole again. According to Verhaeghe,
this explains the female proclivity for fusion and Eros (and the
symbolic). The male part, on the other hand, has differentiated
itself and, by avoiding fusion, he will represent separation and
Thanatos. This gender differentiation should, however, not be in-
terpreted in a binary fashion. Like Eros and Thanatos, they are
always combined—Triebmischung, as Freud called it.
Finally, Verhaeghe stresses that the relationship between the

elements—the dynamics—is more important than the elements on
which it is based. One element always operates as a force of
attraction for the other, leading to a circular but non-reciprocal
interaction. In this never-ending process, where for life-as-such to
continue individual life must meet death, the subject acquires
gender identity as a sequel to the Oedipus complex, which, in a
way of speaking, has interpreted the original loss in terms of
castration.
This phallic interpretation is retroactively applied to all preced-
ing occurrences, which also implies the construction of the body:
not the body we are, but the body we have. This body, writes Paul
Verhaeghe, is clothed in a gender identity, a final working over of
the original gap between life and death. This conflict penetrates not
only society and every loving couple of whatever sex, but every
individual. Rather than interpreting this opposition as mascu-
line versus feminine, he suggests that it should be read as active
versus passive. He concludes with words of wisdom: “as long as
we can fight with our partner, we need not address our inner
division. . . .”
The difference between sexuality and procreation (Juliet Mitchell;

discussant: Colette Chiland). Juliet Mitchell’s contribution takes
the form of a question: “What is the difference between gender and
sexual difference?” and her starting point is the fact that some
people do not feel at home in the body with which they were born.
Such a person, who is labelled transsexual, might even decide to
change her or his body through radical operations, removing
breasts, ovaries, and uterus or penis and testicles. On the remains,
a new body is surgically constructed that analogues/mirrors the
body of the opposite sex. Juliet Mitchell seems to argue, if I have
not misunderstood her, that what the transsexual actually does is
to create a sibling of the opposite sex, which represents the closest
of kin, much closer than either father or mother. This is “only a
shade away from a narcissistic economy”, she writes. In Mitchell’s
book Mad Men and Medusas (Mitchell, 2000), two themes were
central: the importance of sibling relationships and the refusal of
the hysteric, whether female or male, to acknowledge sexual differ-
10 IRÉNE MATTHIS
ence. Here she relates both issues to the question of sexual differ-
ence and gender.
In the group discussions that followed the presentation,1 the
idea of lateral sexuality, with sibling relations as a point of de-
parture, was seen as important, as it is a neglected area in psycho-
analytic theory. The sibling relation becomes powerful not least
because the arrival of a new sibling entails a serious injury and
can be experienced almost as annihilation. But it was also argued
that Juliet Mitchell’s idea introduces an ethical problem. A lateral
gender society may be seen as a pre-oedipal society: a group of
brothers that knows no generational boundaries. Generational dif-
ference was thought to be a necessary condition for an ethical
culture.2
Sketching the history of the terms “sex” and “gender”, Juliet
Mitchell argues that we need to distinguish between sexual differ-
ence and gender in our analysis—not because the terms can be or
ever are kept distinctly apart in real life, but for the sake of analysis.
When the terms are mixed up, as is often the case in Anglo-Saxon
writings, this might lead to a repudiation of sexuality itself.
“Sexual difference” is—up to now, at least—a prerequisite for
human reproduction. If reproduction is tied primarily to the
mother, as is usually the case, motherhood becomes central. The
attempts to “make the mother not the object of the baby’s needs . . .
but instead a subject in her own right” does not, however, change
the currency of traditional Freudian thought: it merely shows the
other side of the coin. For Juliet Mitchell, “sexual reproduction
demands sexual difference, which entails both a subject—object
and heterosexuality. . . . Our egos are . . . always sexed egos, and
they are sexed around reproduction.” Implicitly, this reasoning
seems to follow the line of thought presented by Verhaeghe.
Mitchell argues that sexual and reproductive difference, although
it may rest in biology, is no more “natural” than the ego of the
mirror stage. It is constructed as a representation related to a
subject–object relationship. This aspect is missing in the (mostly)
American perspective, and Juliet Mitchell’s viewpoint stands in
sharp contrast to the one presented by Jessica Benjamin and Nancy
Chodorow in this book.
There is, however, an area of subject/subject construction; but
this is the area of gender, Juliet Mitchell argues, not of sexual
difference. This area of “gender” is the area of sexual drive. Sexual

difference is related to reproductive fantasies, but there is no repro-
ductive drive, Mitchell writes. In the Western world reproduction
has been related to woman and sexuality to man. The libido, as
Freud claimed, is only one, and it is male. The greatest problem
here, Mitchell argues, is not that Freudian theory is phallocentric,
but that Western ideas equate the male with sexuality and the
female with asexual motherhood. Juliet Mitchell wants to give back
to sexuality its central place, because the sexual drive lies behind
all symptoms, and “a large part of this sexual drive is ‘perverse’”.
Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality (1905d) deals with human
drives, and it is still path-breaking. Juliet Mitchell argues that the
concept of “gender” could be developed to become heir to the
Essays, since it is not constructed on the difference between the
sexes but applies in the same way to both women and men. “Gen-
der” is the polymorphously perverse child grown up. Juliet
Mitchell’s radical suggestion is that “gender”, thus understood,
deals with violence and murder. In traditional difference, related to
sexual difference, the other offers the subject what she/he has not
got: a penis, a baby, and so on. As we have already seen, this is an
illusory exchange, doomed to miscarry, as we can never become
“whole”. In the concept of “gender” there is no implication of
something being missing; instead, this “self-same other” is both the
same as self and other than self.
Juliet Mitchell’s arguments reverberate closely with recent de-
velopments in genetics and reproductions of same-but-not-same
organisms—as in cloning. The social and technological changes
that we are experiencing today do not have an immediate repercus-
sion on our psychic life; instead, our psychic life may already
contain something that corresponds to these changes—“indeed,
that may have been part of their precondition”.
The separation of sexuality from procreation/sexual difference
lies at the basis of Juliet Mitchell’s arguments. In her discussion,
Colette Chiland wants to relate this dissociation to perversity,
which she considers specific to human beings. Sexual difference,
she argues, is not only a prerequisite for procreation; it implies so
much more, relating to the genitals, to the position of each partner
in sexual interaction, to psychosexual cycles (for women the men-
strual blood and its connotations in particular), and, above all, to
12 IRÉNE MATTHIS
the interpretations of these in various societies. Consequently, she

disagrees with Mitchell on some issues.
Outlining the history of the term “gender” and the conceptual
constructions related to it, Chiland ends up in a position that is
quite opposite to Mitchell’s. Gender as such, she states, does not
express any form of sexuality, reproductive or not. It is an expres-
sion of “being”. This being is related to self-experience and narcis-
sism. Thus she opposes Mitchell’s claim that gender is heir to
Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). Rather, it is
heir to cultural anthropology as exemplified by Margaret Mead.
At the moment there is a great deal of confusion in the use and
signification of various terms—including the concept of sexuality
itself—but that might be part of the necessary renewal of the study
of sexuality and gender across time and space. Colette Chiland
finally turns to her long experience of working with transsexuals
and argues that we can no longer avoid the question of what a
“male” is and what a “female” is—terms the meaning of which
seemed so self-evident not so long ago. But even if the answers will
be difficult to find, Colette Chiland thinks we do need some kind of
“sex compass”—that is, an “acknowledgement and acceptance of
the sexual difference”.
What kind of gender theories does psychoanalysis need? (Toril Moi;

discussant: Ebba Witt-Brattström). Toril Moi’s investigation of
psychoanalysis and its relation to the “riddle of femininity” starts
from a provocative question: does psychoanalysis need a feminin-
ity theory? The chapter is a tour de force on which she has worked
for years. Her scrutinizing deconstruction of the writings of Freud
and Lacan cannot be summarized in a page or two; I will, however,
pick up some of the threads.
The reader will notice that in this volume the traditional issue of
essentialism versus constructivism, central to many discussions on
femininity during the 1990s, is conspicuously absent. Toril Moi
gives us, indirectly, an understanding of this transition. The con-
crete, living body (essential) is always embedded in a historical
situation and thus open to change (constructed). Viewed from this
perspective, the old opposition between essence and construction
does not apply. It is an approach inspired not only by Freud and
Lacan, but by Simone de Beauvoir in particular, and, finally, by

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Since there is no quest for solving the “riddle of masculinity”
but only the “riddle of femininity”, sexual difference and feminin-
ity have become lumped together. Men have become the self-
apparent norm that need not be explained. Women are different
and consequently a problem that has to be explained. Femininity
theory is a kind of universally applicable theory that tries to do so.
Such a theory of sexual difference does not serve psychoanalysis.
Instead, psychoanalysis needs an understanding of the different
ways of becoming a woman. Femininity theory goes awry since it
predicts what is bound to happen, such as when a little girl discov-
ers that she does not have a penis. Basing her argument on Freud,
Moi emphasizes that psychoanalytic theory is not a predictory,
synthesizing instrument but an analytic one.
Toril Moi starts by posing simple, direct, seemingly naive ques-
tions, such as, “Why does the phallus have to be called phallus if it
has nothing to do with the penis?” and “Why does femininity have
to be called femininity if it has nothing to do with women?” These
questions, however, deserve a close reading and some thorough
thinking. To start with, they bring the relationship between sym-
bols and bodies to our attention and, secondly, the relationship
between symbolic function and social norms and ideology. Lacan,
for example, claims that the relation to the phallus is set up regard-
less of anatomical difference. The phallus, defined as a symbol
within a sophisticated theory, should never be confused or reduced
to the penis. At the same time the phallus is the signifier that
separates humankind into two sexes. These sexes are supposed to
be entirely symbolic, entirely psychosexual, and not to be mixed up
with men and women as such. In such a Lacanian reading, how-
ever, women should not take up a position as feminine more often
than men. But even Lacan acknowledges that women will normally
take up the feminine and men the masculine position. Why is this,
if it has nothing to do with the concrete anatomical body?
Moi believes that the confusion in the interpretation of Lacan’s
writings on femininity might be related to the various meanings of
the French word féminité. It is normally translated as femininity,
connoting psychological and social categories, but in French the
14 IRÉNE MATTHIS
term has many more meanings. It also implies femaleness, which

has biological connotations—the bodies and genitals of the female
human being. When femininity is a matter of castration, as it is for
both Lacan and Freud, women will tend to mask the (anatomical)
castration with a masquerade of femininity (hysteria). In the end
she concludes that Lacan’s femininity theory is, structurally speak-
ing, exactly the same as Freud’s.
Basically, this means that both writers hold that women are
not born—they become women. Simone de Beauvoir reasons along
the same lines. However, problems arise when normative expecta-
tions are coded into such theories, and this is where Beauvoir
differs from Freud and Lacan. She does not try to define a norma-
tive femininity, whereas Freud and Lacan do. The latter differ,
however, in that Freud remains concerned with the concrete,
phenomenological body, whereas for Lacan it is analysed as an
“entirely abstract and idealist concept”. Lacan’s theory of sexual
difference is also, according to Toril Moi, worse than Freud’s. In
Encore, Lacan (1975), writing on the question of woman and wom-
an’s jouissance, even creates algebraic formulas for sexual differ-
ence, thus universalizing his own gendered experience.
Then Toril Moi takes on the large and complex issue of speech
and language. For Lacan, the phallus is the signifier not only of
sexual difference but of meaning—that is, the instituter of symbolic
discourse as such. All symbolic activity is thus labelled phallic.
Toril Moi claims that the Lacanian introduction of post-Saussurean
linguistics into psychoanalysis was a mistake. If the structural
relationship of femininity to the phallus is made purely symbolic,
patriarchy can never disappear. The content can change, but the
structure remains. This critique, relying heavily on a Wittgen-
steinian tradition, is a frontal attack on the linguistic reading of
experience so predominant within Lacanian discourse.
The concept of jouissance—proper to woman, according to
Lacan—is a riddle that leaves translators mute (it is said to be
impossible to translate). Toril Moi claims that what it actually does
is to relegate the female/feminine to a mysterious sphere beyond
language that can never really be known, understood, or ex-
plained. In these kinds of theories femininity has become a “full-
blown metaphysical concept”, she writes. To try to think
femininity within these theories is to “think the unthinkable”—a
phrase she herself uses in her introduction to The Kristeva Reader

(Moi, 1986).
But, Moi continues, any attempt to “think the unthinkable” is
meaningless. If there is a border between what is thinkable and
what is not, this border is already transgressed by “thinking the
unthinkable”. There cannot be a limit to thought, only to language.
Sometimes things are difficult to phrase in an easily understood
language, but that does not mean that they lie “beyond language”
in some kind of mystical, unknown landscape of their own. Such a
view makes a complete mystery of women’s experiences, obscur-
ing rather than clarifying. In this volume Kristeva herself offers an
example of how to write about this area that is supposed to be
“unthinkable”, as do Joyce McDougall and Paul Verhaeghe, each in
her or his own way.
Finally, Toril Moi tries to come to grips with the word and the
concept of “castration”. For Freud as well as Lacan it became
synonymous with femininity and sexual difference. Toril Moi finds
this distressing, and she suggests that this conflation could be
avoided. For Freud, in both sexes the “repudiation of femininity”
has to do with the reluctance to accept the reality principle (the lack
of penis in women). But the difficulty lies in giving up the dream of
being all-encompassing, of having eternal life, and of narcissistic
omnipotence. But why, asks Moi, does this repudiation of reality
have to be called feminine?—Because it is tied up with the concept
of castration! Castration calls forth the notion of sexual difference,
when, instead, we are dealing with a universal human predicament
that engages both men and women. The use of castration as a
general concept projects a deeply sexist notion of sexual difference
onto every human phenomenon. In the end, Moi suggests that we
simply replace it with a more neutral term. Basing her arguments
on Joyce McDougall’s suggestion that there are three fundamental
traumas in human life (the discovery of the other; the discovery of
one-sexedness; and the discovery of death), Toril Moi suggests the
word finitude.
Ebba Witt-Brattström, discussing Toril Moi’s chapter, thinks
that replacing the term “castration” with the word “finitude” does
not solve the problem, since the epistemological work needed to
deal with these problems begins with the body. This was also
heatedly discussed in the groups. In general, people agreed that
16 IRÉNE MATTHIS
“castration” was a problematic word, but some thought “finitude”

was too general a concept to replace it, as it left out the bodily
connotations of “castration” and the affects related to this, such as
fear and envy. In order to solve the problem of the exclusively
masculine connotation of the word “castration” while keeping the
connection to the body, other terms were suggested—such as
“deheading” or decapitation—leaving us with “the guillotine com-
plex”! In this context one is bound to wonder where and how the
bodily metaphors used in psychoanalysis arise: do they originate
with the patient or with the analyst? The discussion group agreed
that if a patient feels castrated and uses the word, it is a proper use
of the term. The word “castration” thus belongs only on the clinical
level. Used as a theoretical concept, it fails. Here, it may help us to
consider the difference between “impossibility” and “incapabil-
ity”: “impossibility” implies a symbolic castration, whereas “inca-
pability” refers to an imaginary castration: a feeling of not being
complete. The term “finitude”, which belongs to a rational meta-
language, works well with symbolic castration, but not with an
imaginary one; in the case of “castration”, it is the other way
around.3
Ebba Witt-Brattström also had doubts about getting rid of femi-
ninity theory. Using her own experience as a professor of literature
with special emphasis on women’s literature, she asks herself how
she would teach her students about women authors from various
periods without using historically defined femininity theories? The
theories might be patriarchal and misconstrued, but they are
needed for the analysis, not as recommendations for living. Making
herself an advocate for “feminist theory” as a combination of
politics and subjectivity, she wants to dismantle patriarchal theo-
ry’s claim to “scientific” objectivity.
Witt-Brattström ends by invoking the founding mothers of
psychoanalysis, whose opinions are often treated dismissively in
the discussion. This “her-story” or collective memory represents a
different epistemological tradition. A great part of women’s litera-
ture brings testimony from this universe, which has been sup-
pressed for too long in society. Witt-Brattström tells us that in their
literature, women authors often refuse to choose between particu-
larity and universality (being either individual woman or human)
and that they look at men as marked just as much by particularity

as women. In the discussion Toril Moi responded that it is not
enough to particularize men—in order to even things up—because
it only means that we end up by reifying not only femininity but
also masculinity.
An intersubjective approach (Jessica Benjamin; discussant: Gisela

Kaplan). Like many of the other contributors to this volume,
Jessica Benjamin starts from the basic assumption that femininity is
not a pre-existing “essence”—whether hysteric or passive—but a
construction by the (male) psyche. Actually, the concepts of mascu-
linity and femininity are both constructs created at the same mo-
ment, and for the same purpose. For Benjamin, it is a specific
purpose: solving the problem of sexual passivity.
Passivity, in the sense defined by Freud, is the key actor in
Benjamin’s presentation. Passivity has often been seen as intoler-
able, especially in men, but Benjamin wants to show that it repre-
sents a “failure of self-regulation based on deficient responses by
the other”. In her view, this failure to relate intersubjectively gener-
ates an “experience of excess”, which implies an overflow with
which the psyche cannot cope. For Freud, this “excess” gave rise to
a feeling of unpleasure or tension, defined from the perspective
of a one-person economy: that is, it was, and is, an intrapsychic
process. For Benjamin, however, pleasure and pain always arise
within a two-person relationship. In this perspective failure of
tension regulation, which she calls excess, is generally linked to
failures in recognition by the other.
Like Kristeva, Benjamin makes use of Laplanche’s idea of the
“enigmatic message”, filled with sexuality and transmitted from
parents to children. When this transmission includes affective ten-
sions that are not understood, represented, or “bound”, it may later
appear as if it was a self-created, one-person fantasy. Thus, for
Benjamin the intrapsychic perspective (so basic in Freud’s writ-
ings) comes to represent those processes that have to deal with
undigested affects, more or less dissociated from other affective
experiences. These undigested affects often relate to sexuality, and
they contribute to a split in the self and between body and mind,
where the sexual fantasy is then discharged physically.
18 IRÉNE MATTHIS
Discharge, which Benjamin links to a one-person economy in

particular, is a means of solving the problem of mental excess,
created by a failure of intersubjective exchange. In this context she
places the handling and workings of passivity/activity. The little
boy, separated from his mother by the intrusion of the father,
experiences himself passively overwhelmed and abandoned. He
fights this by identifying with the father/aggressor, and he projects
the experience of passivity, associated with the baby he once was,
onto the girl/other: the sister. In this way femininity is constructed:
a projection from the oedipal boy’s psyche, creating a kind of
“daughter position”. The daughter is given the role of passive
container and caretaker (the incest victim of Freud’s hysterical case
stories).
At this point in Jessica Benjamin’s discussion the question of
passivity is turned upside-down. Passivity usually connotes help-
and hopelessness. But there is, Benjamin claims, a pleasurable
receptivity in “passivity”, which she goes on to describe. It is
usually assumed that tension, which cannot be mentalized, has to
be discharged. But tension in an intersubjective relation that is
contained can, instead, give rise to mutual enjoyment. What is
needed is a (re)claim of ownership to desire and ownership to a
holding and receptive position, which need not passivize the
other. To Benjamin, ownership implies a notion of sustaining ten-
sion rather than eliminating it. In this intersubjective exchange
passivity in relation to the other can be refigured as surrendering to
a process of joint exploration and recognition. This process tran-
scends gender roles, Benjamin writes, and creates a space of
thirdness.
Throughout the chapter Jessica Benjamin generously supple-
ments her theoretical reasoning and illustrates her ideas with case
vignettes and examples drawn from film and literature.
In her response, Gisela Kaplan points out that Jessica
Benjamin’s arguments are anchored in a dynamics of spiral move-
ments rather than one that is circular or linear. There is also a
polymorphism rather than a dimorphism. In this context, Kaplan
adds that we have to be aware of the fact that we are not only
responding to stimuli from the surrounding world, but actually
altering it in the process—according to how we assess ourselves.
She goes on to exemplify her suggestion.
She believes that this has a bearing on Benjamin’s exposition of

the concept of desire. Tension has to be held and contained in order
for desire to be owned—this is Benjamin’s argument. Kaplan calls
on Michel Foucault when she reminds us that sexuality does not
exist beyond power relations. How can the intersubjective moment
of communication and sharing, so strongly argued by Benjamin,
free itself from power struggles? Power resides everywhere, and
everywhere is male-defined, and thus, to Kaplan, Benjamin’s sug-
gestions are contradictory.
Kaplan feels that the intersubjective sharing described by
Benjamin reflects a cultural pessimism illustrated by her choice of
examples. Eros becomes linked to surrender and death, to loss and
mourning—a product of tensions between maleness and female-
ness, between activity and passivity. It is in the gutter that we
finally understand each other. Kaplan’s interpretation of Eros is
different: she relates it to “a lightness of being” that exists for and
in itself, without visible gain or purpose.
Referring to the Islamic scholar Imam Ghazali, Kaplan states
that virtue arises from a discharge of tensions and culture from the
satisfaction of the sexual drive. In the Western world (in Freud and
in Benjamin’s chapter) discharge is accorded only to the male, but
in the Muslim tradition of Ghazali females, too, “discharge ten-
sion”. The polarization of human sexuality into two kinds—femi-
nine and masculine—is a Western idea.
Finally, Kaplan argues, although the intersubjective moment—
the third space—is a significant extension of earlier ideas, it still is
dependent on the two gendered players or their emotional states.
This space, in Kaplan’s opinion, seems to turn into a kind of prison:
one is contingent on the other, and there is no escape, no freedom.
With Martin Buber, she pledges for some “nothingness”.
A viewpoint from the clinical scene (Nancy J. Chodorow). In the

linguistic model inherited from de Saussure and developed for
psychoanalytic purposes, by Lacan in particular, terms gain their
meanings in relation to one another. Thus, “male” carries its mean-
ing in relation to “female”, “masculinity” in relation to “feminin-
ity”, and conversely. In the Lacanian tradition, this is the Freudian
reference point, and it deals both with genital difference (to have or
not have a penis) and with developmental differences concerned
20 IRÉNE MATTHIS
with generational relationships (the Oedipus complex differs for

boys and girls). In the final contribution to this volume Nancy
Chodorow attacks this model at its roots—at the clinical level—and
claims that sexual difference is not the organizing principle for men
and women in her consulting-room.
Chodorow chooses the clinical option, because, she argues, the
sexual difference perspective ignores precisely what is implied in
the clinical perspective: the uniqueness of each individual. This
means, however, not that she abstains from generalizing, but that
she opts for the generalizing assertions that tally with her own
experience. In this light, it is “same-sex, cross-generational rela-
tions and comparisons”, which means that femininity defines itself
as much through woman–girl relationships as through male–fe-
male ones, and vice versa in the case of masculinity. The mothering
function is, of course, central to this view, and therefore the focus is
on pre-oedipal relations and developments. This does not mean,
however, that the traditional heterosexual oedipal constellation is
repudiated. Nancy Chodorow takes for granted that the impor-
tance of these aspects is already sufficiently demonstrated. How-
ever, their importance is diminished.
One basic component in Chodorow’s theory is that the empha-
sis on difference, whether it be the self–other distinction or male–
female difference, is a defensive theory produced by psychological
conflicts that are characteristically male. Psychoanalytic phallo-
centric theory has conflated the universality of some problems that
demand psychic representation with the almost infinite variety of
unconscious fantasies met with in the consulting-room. Nancy
Chodorow describes the creation of gender as a developmental
product, where the “masculine–feminine” divide is no more funda-
mental in any universal sense than are many other forms of organi-
zation. Further, she argues that even when in a particular case it
plays a fundamental role, it does not necessarily privilege the
actually observed genital difference.
As Nancy Chodorow wants to stay close to the experiences of
each individual, she arrives at the conclusion that for some people
gender is a non-central part of identity, and sexuality is relatively
uncharged and unnoticed. (Others would, of course, challenge this
point of view, claiming that this is the type of denial of sexuality
and the unconscious so typical of some American writers.)
The perspective of Horney, Kestenberg, and others that estab-

lished the theory of primary femininity was a great advance as a
critique of the phallocentric viewpoint. However, according to
Chodorow, it did not really free itself from the comparative male–
female difference perspective. It is as rooted in the anatomical
comparisons as is the traditional conception. She argues that bodily
(and external genital) configurations can be very important to an
individual, but they have to be invested with affects related not to
sexual difference but, rather, to same-sex cross-generational com-
parisons. Finally, she presents some case material to support her
radical suggestion.
Some final words

After this survey it seems clear to me that there are multifarious
ways to organize our self-experience—as women and as men. Does
the term “gender” clarify or confuse in this process? Judging from
the contributions to this volume, it does both. Could we talk about
our different experiences in a sexed world without using the theo-
retical categories of “femininity” and “masculinity”? But if we do
use them, how do we define them? Words carry as well as create
history at the same time; it is therefore important not only to name
things and experiences but also to analyse and take responsibility
for what we have just said.
There are more questions than answers in this book—questions
that are important and will continue to intrigue us. This book will
be needed to remind us of the different opinions and to help us
create tomorrow’s theories.
Human experience cannot be reduced to sexuality, but there is
sexuality in everything human.
NOTE
1. At registration all participants in the conference were divided into
discussion groups (with anywhere from 15 to 200 participants per group). The
groups met four times during the course of the conference to discuss the papers
presented at the panel sessions. This was a much appreciated part of the
conference.
22 IRÉNE MATTHIS
2. Reports from Group 1 (Cecilia Annell) and Group 6 (Harriet Bjerrum

Nielsen).
3. Reports from Group 1 (Cecilia Annell), Group 4 (Svein Haugsgjerd), and
Group 6 (Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen).
REFERENCES
Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7.
Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21.
Lacan, J. (1975). Le Séminaire livre XX. Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller. Paris:
Seuil.
Laplanche, J. (1987). Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse. La
séduction originaire. Paris: PUF. English edition: New Foundations for
Psychoanalysis. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. New York & London:
Norton.
Mitchell, J. (2000). Mad Men and Medusas. Reclaiming Hysteria and the
Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition. London: Penguin
Books.
Moi, T. (1986). Preface. In: T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader (pp. vi–vii).
Oxford: Blackwell.
CHAPTER TWO
Freud and female sexualities
Joyce McDougall
I
n the Victorian era, sexuality was more or less regarded as a
masculine privilege, whereas women were relegated to “con-
jugal duty”, sacrifice, frigidity, or simulated pleasure. This was
Freud’s epoch, and in this respect Freud was an eminent Victorian
in that he tended to take the Victorian woman as the model of
femininity.
Today’s woman would have astonished him and shaken many
of his cherished beliefs concerning female sexuality. In point of fact
the so-called sexual liberation has mostly concerned women, since
in the past it was generally accepted that men could escape the
constraints of conjugal life by having recourse to women who were,
supposedly, exempt from the austerity of the Victorian pattern:
prostitute or mistress. Woman’s sexual life today not only begins
much earlier in adolescence—frequently with the complicity of the
parents—than would have been considered proper in Freud’s day
and age, but due to contraception and the legalization of abortion it
is also released from the association of intercourse with pregnancy.
Thus we are in the presence of a revolution in the social representa-
tions of sexuality and sexual relationships.
23
24 JOYCE M C DOUGALL
However, coming now to the unconscious, we still find re-

pressed fantasies of archaic and pregenital sexualities and fierce
prohibitions stemming for the most part from the interiorization
of biparental fears and wishes. Then there is an added problem for
today’s woman in that she is, in a sense, obliged to feel guilty if
she does not achieve a vaginal orgasm and, as often as not, is
directed to a sexologist to resolve her problem. Thus this era of so-
called liberated sexuality is as conflictual as it was in the past,
even though the complaints and symptoms may have been modi-
fied.
Let us now review Freud’s concepts concerning the little girl’s
accession to womanhood and motherhood. Many analysts, particu-
larly women, have been highly critical of Freud’s conceptual limi-
tations in this field of research. This was, admittedly, an area in
which Freud was particularly vulnerable. It is interesting to recall,
however, that Freud owed to women the initial insights that led
him to the concept of the unconscious: Anna O, Lucy R, Irma,
Emmy von N, Dora, Katharina, and many others were the foun-
tainhead of his inspiration. And of course it is noteworthy that, in
his day and age, he actually listened to them and regarded every-
thing they recounted as significant and important. In Freud’s
dominantly phallocratic epoch, this receptivity in itself was revolu-
tionary. Of all explorers into the functioning of the human mind, he
was the first to take a serious and scientific interest in women’s
sexuality, even if the ideas he came up with were to find disfavour
among analysts—particularly women analysts—for decades to
come. Obviously Freud was fascinated by the mystery of feminin-
ity and by the female sex itself: a characteristic, he claimed, that he
shared with men of all centuries.
But it is evident that Freud was also a little afraid of the objects
of his fascination. His metaphors repeatedly revealed a represen-
tation of the female genital as a threatening void, a lack, a dark
and disquieting continent where you cannot see what is going on.
My own clinical observation with many male analysands leads me
to wonder whether this fear of the unknown interior space is
perhaps a projection onto the woman of man’s fear of his own inner
space and all the early libidinal longings with which it may be in-
vested . . . such as the fear of a longing for the father’s penis, anxi-
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES 25
ety over the wish to be able to bear a child, as well as many other
potential pregenital fears that have been repressed since early
childhood. “Let’s put all of that back into the women” may be part
of the message.
Freud himself insisted that he was obliged to proceed from his
knowledge of male sexuality. (In fact, the theory of the libido is an
eminently male concept.) Thus we are not surprised at his deduc-
tions of the little girl’s extreme envy of the boy’s visible and
interesting organ. In other words, Freud appears to be saying, “If I
were a girl, my only desire would be to possess a penis of my own.”
The notion that boys might also be envious of the girl’s vagina, of
her capacity for bearing children, and of her potential attraction for
the male precisely because she did not have a penis does not seem
to have occurred to Freud.
But it was also Freud himself, with his typical honesty, who first
expressed feelings of deep dissatisfaction and uncertainty concern-
ing his theories about women and their psychosexual develop-
ment. In fact, he waited until 1931 to publish “Female Sexuality”,
his first paper on the subject. He was then 75 years old! Perhaps at
this stage of his life he felt less fear of the female and of revealing
his theories about her.
In his second famous and much criticized paper entitled “Femi-
ninity”, which was published two years later, he wrote: “Psychol-
ogy . . . is unable to solve the riddle of femininity” and noted that
“. . . the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more
difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks, to
which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a
man”. The “tasks” refer to Freud’s two major concepts concerning
the difficulties in growing to womanhood: the little girl must first
effect a change in the organ of excitement from clitoris to vagina
and, second, she must effect a change of object. “When and why
does she give up her fixation to her mother in favour of her father?”
Freud asked.
Although these two dimensions do present a certain challenge
to the attainment of adult femininity and sexual pleasure, they are
nevertheless far from exhaustive as explanatory concepts for the
understanding of woman’s psychosexuality. Let us examine them
more closely.
Anatomy as destiny?
Can we agree with Freud that the most authentic conception of
women derives from the notion that penis envy is the motivating
factor in inaugurating femininity? Perhaps we must look for the
precursors of the era of penis envy, going back even to the begin-
ning of life at which the earliest transmission of the sense of sexual
identity is laid down.
The essential relationship that infants normally share with the
mother in the first months of life provides the baby girl, in contrast
to the boy, with a double identification. The somatopsychic images
that are destined to become mental representations of her feminine
body and its erogenous zones are already being formed. It is at this
early stage that mouth and vagina become linked in their erogenous
significance and, along with other erogenic organs and internal
sensations, are integrated into the somatopsychic representations.
To these must be added the clitoral sensations stimulated by the
mother’s physical handling and cleaning of her baby. These spe-
cific sensations were the only erogenous body links to which Freud
gave much attention in his theory of the development of feminine
eroticism. For reasons of his own, Freud assimilated the female
clitoris into the male penis, thus “bisexualizing” the female genita-
lia: the vagina is “feminine and passive”, the clitoris “masculine
and active”. And to achieve femininity the clitoris is to be elimi-
nated as an erogenic zone. Freud was unaware of the fact that the
clitoris is an extremely complex organ and, in view of its consider-
able extensions into the female body, a relatively large structure.1
In addition to his anti-clitoridian stand, Freud further holds that
the vagina will only be discovered many years later. So meanwhile
we are left with the impression that the girl is in a genital desert
from infancy to adolescence. Also, Freud makes no attempt to
justify a theory of infantile sexuality in which there is only one
genital organ. This suggests that, for the young Freud, severe
repression may have taken place regarding the various possible
representations of the female sex and the female body and its
functions.
It is tempting to attribute Freud’s denigrating portrait of femi-
ninity to some unrecognized envy of woman on his part—or in-
deed on the part of the Victorian era as a whole. Let us take his
description from the New Introductory Lectures, published in 1933,

in which we read that woman suffers, from the beginning of
childhood, from an “initial sexual inferiority”, and that “jealousy
and envy play a greater part in the mental life of women than of
men”; she also suffers from “superego defects”, because, lacking a
penis, she has no longer to fear castration. Instead, Freud notes that
her “physical vanity [is] a compensation for her original sexual
inferiority”. Women suffer only “conventional shame” . . . and
merely to “conceal their genital deficiency”. Moreover, they “have
made few contributions to . . . the history of civilization”. Their
love partners are chosen narcissistically—that is, “in accordance
with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wished to
become”. After this debased portrait of womanhood Freud contin-
ues by proclaiming that “women must be regarded as having little
sense of justice” and are also “weaker in their social interests [and
display] less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men”. He
then goes on to propose that a woman of thirty “often frightens us
by her psychical rigidity. . . . Her libido has taken up final positions
and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no
paths open to further development . . . as though . . . the difficult
development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the
person concerned.”
He concludes with “that is all I had to say to you about feminin-
ity.” However, he adds: “[woman’s] nature is determined by [her]
sexual function . . . but we do not overlook the fact that an indi-
vidual woman may be a human being in other respects as well”!
Motherhood
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Freud had elevated Victorian
prejudices to the rank of a theory! The reference to woman as
possibly “possessing some human characteristics” is perhaps a
vague recall of Freud’s beliefs regarding motherhood in which he
states categorically that “A mother is only brought unlimited satis-
faction by her relation to a son” (because he has the penis of which
she feels deprived), and Freud continues by claiming that the
mother–son relationship is “the most perfect, the most free from
ambivalence of all human relationships”. Perhaps this tells us more
about Freud and how he hoped his mother felt about his birth—in
which the mother’s attachment to the father appears to play no role
since the son is now the centre of her universe.
As Mary Jacobus—professor of the Humanities at Cornell Uni-
versity—phrases it: “motherhood . . . was the only known Freudian cure
for the neurosis of femininity” (Jacobus, 1995).
Thus Freud’s theory of femininity may be summarized as fol-
lows: The little girl is at first a little boy, and her earliest libidinal
wish is to possess her mother sexually; she then replaces this aim
with the desire to possess a penis, then to have a child from her
father, and, finally, to have a male child of her own. Apparently, it
seemed to Freud that no woman would particularly want a daugh-
ter and that, once in possession of a son, she desired nothing
further. The implacable logic of Freud’s chain of signifiers suggests
that the girl’s desire for a baby is merely a substitute for the penis she
does not possess, and her love for her father a mere consequence of penis
envy! This is admittedly a rather pitiful view of the place of the
father in the little girl’s psychic universe. Furthermore, Freud’s
concept of object substitutions implies that the girl-child’s pro-
found homosexual ties to her mother are simply eliminated
through penis envy!
There were, of course, in psychoanalytic writings many exten-
sions and additions—as well as criticisms—of Freud’s theories
about women: the leading feminist psychoanalysts of that epoch
being Karen Horney, Joan Riviere, and Melanie Klein. Today most
analysts would agree that the envy of her father’s penis is a very
partial explanation of the difficulties that lie on the path to mature
womanhood. It should also be noted that boys as well as girls suffer
from their own characteristic form of penis envy, invariably find-
ing their penises too small in comparison with that of their fathers,
and clinical experience confirms that the boy’s envy and admira-
tion of his mother’s body and sexuality is similar to the girl’s envy
and admiration of her father’s penis and sexual prowess. Children
of both sexes are aware that mother embodies the magical power to
attract father’s penis and make the babies that both parents desire.
I would like to point out here that, for both males and females,
monosexuality remains one of humankind’s major narcissistic
wounds—a scandalous affront to our childlike omnipotence! Inter-
nalizing a symbolic representation of the complementarity of the

two sexes requires a renunciation of the childlike wish to be and to
have both.
Female body image

I should now like to turn to certain aspects of femininity that have
been of particular interest to me over my years of analytic practice
(and of self-analysis!): first of all, the importance of the little girl’s
experience of her body and the representation of her genital as an
inner space, since this affects the global psychic representation of
her femininity and of sexual relations to come. I would like there-
fore to explore the anatomical issues inherent in the girl-child’s
development of her sense of gender identity from this viewpoint.
As the girl’s sex is a portal into her body, the vagina is destined to
be equated in the unconscious with anus, mouth, and urethra and
is therefore liable to share both the masochistic and the sadistic
libidinal investments and fantasies carried by these zones. The
little girl—and frequently the woman-to-be—is more likely than
her male counterpart to fear that her body will be regarded as dirty
or dangerous because of these zonal confusions, in addition to the
anatomical fact that there is no visible organ that can be controlled
and verified.
Even the adult woman frequently experiences her body as a
dark continent in which anal and oral monsters lurk. Of course
much of her unconscious representation of her body and her geni-
tals will reflect the libidinal and narcissistic significance that the
mother gave to her daughter’s physical and psychological self, as well as
the extent to which she may have transmitted unconscious fears
concerning her own bodily and sexual functions. The non-verbal sensu-
ous and later verbal communications between mother and daugh-
ter determine, in large part, whether oral erotism triumphs over
oral aggression and whether anal-erotic impulses become more
important than, or combine harmoniously with, anal-sadistic ones.
A further aspect of feminine anatomical destiny involves
autoerotic experience. Since the little girl cannot visually verify her
genitals, she tends to create an imprecise or zonally condensed
psychic representation of them, particularly since she has difficulty

in locating the sexual sensations of which she has been aware since
early infancy. In this way clitoral, vaginal, urethral, and other
internal sensations tend to be confused. This blurring of sensations
has important repercussions, among others, on female fantasies
concerning masturbation.
Masturbation and femininity

Although masturbation is the normal sexuality of children, it is
eventually inhibited by parental constraints. All children learn that
it is not permissible to defecate, urinate, or masturbate in public.
Even when these restrictions are imposed with kindness and un-
derstanding, they leave an imprint on unconscious fantasy life.
When they are imposed harshly because of the parents’ own inter-
nal disquiet and subsequent need to diminish their anxiety through
controlling their children’s bodies, the risk of later neurotic prob-
lems is notably increased.
When told to give up masturbating publicly, a little boy is apt to
imagine that if he fails to do as he is told, his father will attack his
penis, believing also that father has guessed his sexual desire for
mother as well as his ambivalent feelings towards his Dad. In the
same phase of oedipal reorganization, the little girl is more likely to
fear that her mother will attack and destroy the whole inside of her
body as a fantasized punishment for her wish to take her mother’s
place, to share erotic games with her father, and to make a baby
with him. In other words, the little boy fears that the punishment
for his masturbatory fantasies is castration, whereas the little girl
frequently equates the retribution for masturbation and erotic day-
dreams with death.
In a panel on “Female Sexuality” at a meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, the Californian analyst Phyllis Tyson
once remarked that failure in the integration of primary femininity
frequently had an inhibitory effect on the normal masturbation of
adolescence, and she pointed out that in masturbation the young
girl not only derives new pleasure from her body but also “further
consolidates her feminine identification with her mother”. I myself
have made the clinical observation that when the ban on autoerotic
pleasure is lifted, there frequently follows a series of new
introjections and new sublimations.
Woman and time

I would like to point out that woman has a specific psychological
relationship to time as compared with man. It seems highly prob-
able that, among other factors, women experience time differently
from men in large part because of their biological rhythms: before
each monthly period, during and after the period, the sudden
stopping of periods when a new baby is on the way, and, of course,
the drama of menopause, which all, in one way or another, are
time-related and all require a mourning process. These biological–
psychological rhythms also underline the significance of blood for
the woman and are inscribed in a symbolic register in which
time—before and after—plays an essential role.
Geneviève Say, a French therapist and research writer, once
presented a paper entitled “Pas de règles, pas de corps” [“Without
periods, no body”], proposing that “without the experience of
menstruation there is no fundamentally feminine body; thus it is
essential that these biological time-rhythms be integrated and
given meaning in order to allow the adolescent girl to achieve what
is termed ‘genitality’”.
In an article entitled “Le temps des femmes” [which we might
translate as “time and woman”], Julia Kristeva describes woman’s
sense of time as “cyclic, monumental and symbolic” and suggests
that we might contrast this to time that is, as she puts it, “lineal,
chronological, historical, political—and imprinted with masculine
subjectivity . . .” (Kristeva, 1993).
I would like to add at this point that in many long years of
supervision with candidates and also with quite experienced ana-
lysts, I have been struck by the fact that the majority of male
analysts seem to avoid—or appear highly hesitant about—asking a
female patient any questions concerning her menstrual cycle, per-
haps because of a feeling that such interest may be received by the
analysand as intrusive.
As Helene Deutsch pointed out long ago: puberty and meno-

pause both encircle the present—one looking ahead, the other
looking backwards (Deutsch, 1944). This is surely an important
dimension of time requiring analysis and one that may be over-
looked for countertransference reasons.
Sexuality and creativity

I should like in this context to quote a brief clinical example that
illustrates the inhibitory effect on creative work in women for whom
all manifestations of childhood sexuality have been severely con-
demned, and in whom primitive body fantasies have persisted in
an unintegrated form.2
“Tamara”, a talented violinist, suffered such paralysing anxiety

before a performance that she often had to cancel her engage-
ments at the last minute. After many months of mutual re-
search, in which we attempted to reconstruct the unconscious
scenario that was being enacted before every anticipated con-
cert, she was able to capture the following fantasy: “I fool the
whole world. Everybody will see that all I produce is excre-
ment, and that I myself am as valueless as a pile of shit.” In
addition, she felt that she both hated and loved her musical
instrument. Following a dream in which she was caressing her
violin which then turned into a woman’s body, she became able, for
the first time in her life, to love and caress her own body, and
she subsequently came to experience her violin as an extension
of her body, which she could now permit herself to touch and
think about with affection.
As the analysis proceeded, she began to feel freer to contem-
plate allowing others to see this libidinized extension of her
bodily self into her musical instrument and even to imagine that
she might give a performance with unequivocal affection one
day. With the new investment of her corporeal being came a re-
evaluation of her body’s natural functions. At one session she
announced, “You know, you have led me to understand that
there is ‘good shit’ and ‘bad shit’. Why can I not accept that I
want to offer good things to the public?”
In the sessions that followed we came to understand that,

beneath her fear that she would exhibit what she believed to be
an ugly and sexless body, there slowly emerged another
Tamara who was beginning to live within her body and to
believe that she had valuable gifts to offer to the outside world.
Once her primitive libidinal fantasies were well integrated in
their positive aspects, her severe inhibitions stemming from
these sources were alleviated. A year after the termination of
her analysis, she sent me two tickets for a concert in which she
gave a most moving performance.
Sexual deviations in women

The value of Freud’s legacy to the topic of female sexuality and its
relation to sexual perversion can be debated for several reasons.
First of all there is the problem of his phallocentrism. His reasoning
was founded entirely on a male standpoint from which came his
over-emphasis on penis envy. In addition, his idealization of moth-
erhood—in accordance with the social discourse of his era—has
since played a role in impeding research into the question of
perverse motherhood. Mothers are not universally good or even
always “good enough”: the challenge to the psychoanalyst is to
understand what lies beneath the behaviour of mothers who abuse
their children either physically or sexually. Almost invariably the
pattern of abuse goes back three generations or more. The mother’s
relationship to the child who is destined to be treated perversely
can frequently be traced to factors that gave rise to traumatic
events in the parents’ own childhoods—factors often affecting the
place or destiny that this child, even before her birth, is expected to
fulfil. Sometimes the parents implicitly impose that the child “pay”
for what they, the parents, have suffered, or that she embody
certain aspects of the parents—either negative or positive qualities
and attributes—for which they themselves do not assume responsi-
bility.
I am reminded here of a young girl of 13 years of age who

testified that her father had had incestuous relations with her
for a number of years. At the time I saw her, the father was in
prison, and the daughter felt very guilty about having de-
nounced him. Later came an interview with the mother who, as
is so often the case, was in complicity with the incestuous
relationship but turned a blind eye. When asked why this was,
she said, “Well, these things do happen in families, don’t they?”
“And how was it in your family?” “My brother, three years
older than me, forced me to have sexual relations with three of
his friends while he watched from behind a curtain. . . . When I
told my mother, she said that boys were like that, and that I
should try to keep out of their way in the future. She also
warned me not to say anything to my father.”
Coming now to the question of what might be deemed “perverse

motherhood”, much of the pioneering work into this field of re-
search has been initiated by Estela Welldon, a psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London—a clinic founded
by Edward Glover and set up to deal principally with individuals
suffering from any aspect of their sexuality, as well as those in-
volved with drug addictions. Describing her work with sexual
inhibitions in women (Welldon, 1989), the author points out that
mothers obviously occupy a unique place in the lives of their
nurslings and therefore possess unique power over them. Welldon
emphasizes that the misuse of this power frequently manifests
itself through battering children, or through committing incest
with them. Verbal abuse—which, I would like to emphasize, is
frequently revealed to be even more damaging than physical
abuse—is another misuse of maternal power. Similarly, giving
false or frightening information about gender and sexual realities
may have effects as destructive as incest, with regard to the attain-
ment of one’s sense of sexual identity and gender role.
One of the conceptual difficulties in discussing and exploring
perverse behaviour in women stems from the fact that, since
Freud’s time, sexual perversion has been closely identified with
male sexuality and the penis. Deviant sexual constructions were
understood as defences against castration fears and the conflicts
engendered by the male Oedipus complex. Thus the literature
suggests that women have no need to create sexual deviations.
Freud believed that the Oedipus complex of the little girl was
resolved once she accepted the fact that she could imagine receiv-
ing a child from her father instead of a penis. This view implies that
women have no need of perverse sexual creations—they simply
have babies instead!
In contrast to Freud’s formulation, female castration anxiety—
as already indicated—is more intense and more pervasive than
that of man, since a young girl’s fears are centred on her whole
body with a particularly intense focus on her “inner space” where
her genital sensations are experienced. In her remarkable book
Mother, Madonna, Whore, Welldon states that, whereas in men per-
verse acts are aimed at an external part-object, in women these are
usually carried out “against their own bodies or against objects
they see as their own creation: their babies. In both cases, babies
and bodies are treated as part objects.”
There are nevertheless many features shared by both boys and
girls. For example, in both sexes there is marked anxiety at the
phase of oedipal genital wishes and fantasies, and beyond this we
also find deep insecurity regarding one’s subjective identity. These
anxieties are one primal cause for the creating of deviant erotic
scenarios; in addition, the insecurity that assails small children, and
later the adolescent-to-be, invariably releases affects of anger and
violence that must also find a solution and gratification in the
sexual invention. It is perhaps observations of this kind that led
Robert Stoller (1976) to define perversions as “the erotic form of
hatred”.
For both sexes, the original hate objects—or part-objects—are
relatively unconscious. The little girl who in adulthood develops
deviant forms of sexual acts or relationships—such as exhibition-
ism or sadomasochism—often felt unwanted, ignored, or smoth-
ered by her own mother. Others experience themselves as a
part-object belonging to the mother and therefore treated as a
narcissistic prolongation of her. Each of these forms of relationship
creates raging hatred. From being victims, these women may
sometimes become victimizers, in which case the “other”—child or
lover—is, in turn, treated as a part-object. Such forms of relation-
ship often serve as a manic screen against a deeply unconscious
terror of losing the mother or the mother’s love and consequently
the loss of all sense of identity.
As already discussed, eroticization may often serve as a defence

against shocking childhood experiences. This frequently gives rise
in the adult woman to a search for partners who will join in deviant
sexual practices in which pain, humiliation, or violent attack are
coupled with intense erotic excitement. Thanks to the construction
of such complex erotic games, childhood traumata may be ren-
dered tolerable—and not surprisingly—such sexual inventions are
usually marked by an inexorable compulsivity. This brings me to the
consideration of the complicity of the couples involved in deviant
sexual scenarios.
Couples and shared deviancy

I have observed that those of my female analysands who engage
in sexual practices dominated by pregenital, fetishistic, or sado-
masochistic acts frequently did so at the insistence of their lovers
or husbands. Although each woman complained about this, in
most cases we were able to reconstruct her infantile past in such a
way as to understand why she had chosen this particular mate
and how she, too, gained secret satisfaction from their sexual
rituals.
In my Eros I gave two examples of such unconscious complicity
between couples: In the first case, a young woman complained
from the beginning of her analysis of her dislike for her husband’s
insistence that she urinate upon him in the course of their sexual
relations. She was eventually able to recapture a hitherto repressed
memory in which a group of little boys had asked her to take off
her panties, climb up a tree, and show them how girls urinate. This
she did with alacrity and great excitement but was caught by the
maid and severely reprimanded by her parents. In the second case,
a woman who had received a daily enema from her father from
early childhood until adolescence was married to a man who
secretly engaged in a solitary fetishistic sexual game in which he
administered an enema to himself while imagining that he was
giving this enema to a woman partner. In each case the partners
seemed to have chosen each other because of unconscious pregeni-
tal erotism of a rather intense kind.
Primary homosexuality
Before concluding, I would like to summarize briefly the elements
of primary homosexuality in the girl-child. But first of all let us
recall Freud’s conception of the little girl’s accession to adult femi-
nine sexuality: according to him, the girl-child’s first wish is to take
sexual possession of her mother; then follows the desire for a penis;
this, in turn, leads to the wish to receive a baby from her father and
finally to her deepest longing—according to Freud—to be the
mother of a boy-child. As stated in my Eros, this chain of signifiers
suggests that, for the woman, a baby is a mere equivalent of the
penis she does not possess and, indeed, that her love for her father
is little more than the consequence of her “penis envy”.
From my own analytic work with children and many long years
of clinical observation of adult woman patients, I would propose
that not only does the little girl wish to possess her mother sexu-
ally, as Freud suggests, but she would also like to create children
with her and be singularly loved by her, in a world from which all
men are excluded. At the same time she also wants to resemble her
father and possess his genitals, as well as the idealized qualities she
attributes to him. In this way she dreams of fulfilling in her moth-
er’s life the important erotic and narcissistic role of the father in
relation to her mother. It is obvious that, through lack of fulfilment,
these drives tend to become associated with narcissistic injury. It is
perhaps this additional factor that gave Freud the impression that
penis envy was the predominant dimension in the psychosexual
structure of woman.
Although the universal bisexual wishes of infancy are equally
strong in both sexes, the girl’s problem is more intricate than her
brother’s in that the girl-child and her mother are not sexually
complementary. She is not able, as her little brother is, to believe
that she has a uniquely different sexual configuration and perhaps
a specific value for this reason in her mother’s eyes. Thus it is
conceivable that the little girl has more conflictual internal mothers
in her psychic universe than does the boy-child. The mother is, at
one and the same time, adored, desired, resented, and feared.
This is one of the reasons that, during adolescence, the daughter
typically rejects her mother in many ways but will turn towards
her with renewed attachment when she herself becomes a mother.
It is at this point that many girls finally forgive their mothers for all
their infantile resentments. Just as every child that a daughter bears
represents, in unconscious fantasy, a baby she has made with her
father, so too her babies are often felt to be a gift to the mother
and—in the deeper layers of her unconscious—a baby she has
made with her mother.
Some women identify with the mother as a sexually desiring
adult but do not themselves desire children. In this case, they are
liable to experience their professional, intellectual, or artistic activi-
ties as giving birth to symbolic children. But here again specific
feminine problems arise. Many women in analysis reveal a fear
that they must choose between motherhood and professional activi-
ties; others express a similar feeling of dichotomy between their
lives as lovers and their lives as mothers. Accomplishing these
three distinct feminine desires—the sexual, the maternal, and the
professional—requires a delicate balance if women are to avoid the
conviction that they are impelled to sacrifice their own narcissistic
and libidinal needs in any one of these areas.
In conclusion
While I am aware that there are many aspects that remain to be

explored concerning femininity, female sexuality, and the place of
woman in today’s world, may I say, paraphrasing Freud: “That is
all I have to tell you (today) about female sexuality.”
NOTES
1. It is interesting to note that the complete clitoral organ with its internal
appendices was neither charted, nor even named, until relatively recently—as
is clearly set forth in a remarkable book, A New View of a Woman’s Body,
compiled by the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (1981).
2. This vignette is taken from a work of mine entitled The Many Faces of
Eros (McDougall, 1995).
REFERENCES
Deutsch, H. (1944). The Psychology of Women. New York: Grune &
Stratton.
Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Center (1981). A New View of a
Woman’s Body. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Freud, S. (1933a). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S.E., 22.
Jacobus, M. (1995). First Things. London: Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1993). Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’Âme. Paris: Fayard.
McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. New York and London:
Norton.
Stoller, R. (1976). Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York:
Aronson.
Welldon, E. (1989). Mother, Madonna, Whore. New York: Aronson.
CHAPTER THREE
Some observations on female sexuality
Julia Kristeva
The primary oedipal phase: seduction and invasion
F
emale psychosexual development involves two versions of
the Oedipus complex, as several authors including Freud
have stated, and I would now like to put forward a revised
interpretation (cf. Kristeva, 1996a, 1996b).
The earliest period, from birth to the so-called phallic phase
starting at between three and six years of age, I shall term the
primary oedipal phase. It is true that, in his concluding works on
female sexuality (1923e, 1925j, 1931b), Freud emphasizes what is
generally termed phallic monism: “the main characteristic of this
‘infantile genital organisation’ . . . consists in the fact that, for both
sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account.
What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals but a
primacy of the phallus” (1923e, p. 308). In other words, psychically
speaking there is an inherent masculinity in the child irrespective
of its anatomical sex: “the little girl is a little man”. This axiom,
which was initially considered to refer to infantile—and not
adult—sexuality or to a fantasy, finally emerges here from Freud’s
pen as a sine qua non fact of all sexuality.
41
42 JULIA KRISTEVA
However, in his last writings, Freud reveals a particular cling-

ing and intense relationship between the little girl and her mother
that is not easily accessible to analysis because it is encysted in
preverbal sensory experience, which the founder of psychoanalysis
likens to “Minoan–Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization
of the Greeks” (Freud, 1931b, p. 372). It forms the basis of psychic
bisexuality, which “comes to the fore much more clearly in women
than in men” (p. 374). However, Lacan, who strongly emphasizes
the “primacy of the phallus”, supporting the “symbolic function”
and the name of the father [nom du père] in the psychic organization of
the subject of either sex, comments in passing that “maternal in-
stinct” is a part of female sexuality that is irreducible by analysis
because it eludes the ascendancy of phallic primacy.1
Finally, on the basis of contemporary clinical observation, sev-
eral psychoanalysts suggest that at the origins of infantile sexuality
the early maturation of human beings exposes the infant to adult,
and especially maternal, intrusion. The protective nature of paren-
tal support does not make it any less seductive: straight away,
infantile sexuality develops under the influence of these parental
and primarily maternal “enigmatic signifiers” (cf. Laplanche, 1987,
p. 125). These signifiers imprint the mother’s unconscious on the
child’s erogenous zones, along with the erotic link she has with the
father and the father’s own unconscious. This initial co-excitation
between mother and baby thus seems a long way from the idyllic
models of Minoan–Mycenaean civilization evoked by Freud, or
from a serenity of “being” preceding the drive-related behaviour
described by Winnicott. Infantile sexuality, which is not that of the
instincts but that of the drives understood as psychosomatic con-
structions, pre-existent biology-and-meaning is thus formed from
the outset in the newborn’s interaction with his two parents and
under the ascendancy of maternal seduction. The fact that it is the
mother who takes care of the child, thereby becoming the agent of
the unconscious intrusion, does not prevent her female desire for
the father—the father of the child or her own—or the child’s father’s
own actions and speech from being the means by which the father
plays a part from the outset as the subject of this original imprint-
ing, for the girl as for the boy, and differently according to the sex.
The child, who allows himself to be seduced and seduces with
his skin and his five senses, engages by the very fact of his orifices:
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY 43
mouth, anus; and vagina for the little girl. Usually this female
organ is not appealed to, but it is hard to imagine that it should be
covered in the only insensitive membrane, as Freud bizarrely and
incautiously suggests in his simile of the “harder wood” (1905d, p.
143)—unless this supposed insensitivity were to have a defensive
function. The founder of psychoanalysis rightly points to the ab-
sence in either sex of an unconscious representation of the vagina,
other than as something “lacunar” or “cloacal”, lent to the anus, as
Lou Andreas-Salomé (1980, p. 107) expressed it. But does this
visual deficit not make the representative of cavernous—particu-
larly vaginal or cloacal—excitation, by that very fact, more unfath-
omable and problematic for the future unity of the subject?
The seduced, orificial, invaded child: At the origins of Minoan–

Mycenaean sexuality, we find a sexual being, the “perverse poly-
morph”, prefiguring the penetrated being of the woman.
Throughout this first phase of psychic sexualization, the sexuality
of the primary oedipal phase, abandoned to the maternal–paternal
seduction, however passive, is nonetheless both reactive and ac-
tive, as is aggressively emphasized by the expulsion of stools and
of vocal and gestural expressions. In the boy, penile excitation—
later intensified by the phallic phase—is superimposed on the
complex range of reactions that result from this original invasion–
seduction, underlying and structuring the “feminine position” of
the male subject. This position continues to characterize the man’s
sexuality, specifically his desire for oral and anal possession of the
father’s penis and for its destruction in the maternal breast, which
is fantasized as containing this penis, and so forth.
Interactive subjectivity and psychization

For the girl, the primary oedipal phase contains some more com-
plex ambiguities. On the one hand, her “skin-ego” (Anzieu, 1985)
and orificial2 ego lend themselves to the seduction–passivization
that simultaneously engages narcissism and masochism, with its
sadistic abreactions—devouring the breast with the penis, bom-
barding it with stools, and so on. Clitoral excitation, varying from
subject to subject and naturally less intense than penile excitation,
44 JULIA KRISTEVA
is nevertheless also mobilized to direct the girl towards active

possession of the first object that is constituted by the unconscious
seducing mother. But this erectile activity seems to be heavily
masked, and even surpassed, by orificial excitation and by the
erotic participation of the oral–anal–vaginal cavernous body in the
early link with the mother. Whereas Karl Abraham, followed by
Melanie Klein and the English school, emphasized this early in-
volvement of a vaginal–anal femininity in the oedipal phase, par-
ticularly for the girl, Freud refers to it only rarely, for example in
the case of Dora (1905e [1901]; 1919e). As Jacques André comments,
it is highly significant that this text is contemporaneous with . . .
Freud’s analysis of his own daughter Anna! This was in fact an
exceptional opportunity for an analyst, both as man and as father,
to confront the little girl’s early genital seduction . . . by her father!
The strong vaginal–cloacal mobilization, like the little girl’s clitoral
excitation, structure her earliest sexuality as a psychic bisexuality
that is simultaneously passive and active. Thus bisexuality is more
strongly accentuated in the girl than in the boy.
More interestingly, what this perspective seems to reveal—as
the treatment of adult women confirms, if only by discovering the
defensive symptoms—is that the primary oedipal phase with its
location of the defensive symptoms is governed not by a simple
passivization but, above and beyond this, by the installation of an
interactive subjectivity that is not adequately accounted for by the
active–passive dichotomy. The orificial invasion is compensated
not only by clitoral excitation but also by the early elaboration of an
identificatory and introjective link with the seductive and intrusive object
constituted by the mother (insofar as she also relays the father’s
desire).
The girl introjectively installs the seductive mother inside her:
the excited cavity of the inner body mutates into an internal repre-
sentation. Thus begins a slow and long-lasting work of psychization
that is later accentuated by the secondary oedipal phase, in which the
female tendency to privilege psychic or loving representation–
idealization over erotic drive excitation can be recognized. This
female psychization is, however, placed in difficulties by identifi-
cation with the agent of the parental seduction—an identification
reinforced by the resemblance between girl and mother and by the
projection onto the girl of maternal narcissism and depressivity.
For the girl, this process results partly in an early psychization of

the object that the young ego introjects by identification and partly
from this identification with the mother, the additional creation of
a real link of possession and dependence with the same object. The
little girl’s cavernous excitability and its attendant psychic interi-
ority are stabilized by a clinging to the real external object. In other
words, the sensory reality of the object and the real presence of the
mother are demanded as a compensation for the invasion of the
cavernous body and the psychic introjection that are constantly
taking place. This real need for the link latches on to a place such as the
cloacal interior, claiming an imaginary insatiable premium for the
oral, anal, and vaginal pleasures that are undergone rather than
taken by the little girl. The latter’s link with her maternal object is
coupled with the mother’s symmetrical attachment to her infant
girl: rather than set up her daughter as a phallic substitute, as is
generally the case with the boy, the female parent projects her own
narcissistic fantasies and latent masochistic or depressive tenden-
cies, echoing with the little girl’s orificial pleasures.
The economy of the primary oedipal phase—invasion and
passivization of the orificial body by the other, aggression towards
and oral, anal, and clitoral possession of the other, and compensa-
tion by psychic hypercathexis of the object that early on creates an
interiority dependent on the object—proves to be more accentuated
for the little girl than it is in the little boy’s monovalent oedipal
phase. Because of the anatomical difference between the sexes, as
well as for historical and cultural reasons determining the ambiva-
lence of the parental seduction with regard to the “second sex”, the
girl’s primary oedipal phase precipitates her into a later developmen-
tal stage that is both more fragile and more complex than the
boy’s.
The girl is more exposed to passivization because clitoral excita-
tion does not eliminate orificial pleasure, unlike the boy, for whom
phallicism is supposed to surpass, if not eradicate, oral and anal
receptivity. However, the little girl already appears more protected
by the formation of an early interiority in which the introjection of
the other (of the mother as mediator of the father), relayed by the
girl–mother identification, transforms this maternal other into an
indispensable object, as a vital co-presence of a link to others,
experienced as a need that is ready and waiting, like an understudy
46 JULIA KRISTEVA
for desire, that is to be cultivated and maintained in external reality

and that will endure as an absolute necessity of female psycho-
sexuality.
In other words, the little girl’s dependence on her mother’s love
directly prepares the status of the woman’s erotic object. Only
rarely is the woman’s object a “partner” in desire, but, more exclu-
sively, a “lover” whom she asks to understand her as if he were . . .
a mother. The psychic link with him that the female lover requires
is not easily interchangeable, and this asymmetry inexorably deter-
mines the discord between the sexes. As for the possibility of a
woman blossoming in the erotic quest itself, she would need a very
strong phallic identification to conceal her invaded interiority and
need for a psychic link, so as to be satisfied with those “thousand
and one” objects, petit “a”, which fail to gratify the fetishistic
longings of Don Juan himself.
Beyond the two pitfalls of narcissism and passivizing maso-
chism, the complexity of the primary oedipal phase therefore estab-
lishes the little girl as a psychic being and a binding agent. With the
emergence of the little girl’s sexuality, we witness the dawn of love
and sociability. Of course, this economy is also the one that to
varying degrees governs the man’s femininity, which remains re-
pressed by conquering phallicism, providing that it is not abre-
acted in a contrary manner by passage to the homosexual act.
My reflections on the girl’s primary oedipal phase are not in-
tended to diminish the structuring role that phallic authority and
its attendant castration anxiety play in the psyche. My intention is
only to assign them to their place as organizers of the unconscious
while bearing in mind that they appear in the infant’s psyche by
mediation of the parental seduction, adding to the reactive excit-
ability of the seduced child.
The secondary oedipal phase:

encounter with phallicism
In post-Freudian treatment, it is maintained that the structuring
phallic component, participating in the repression of excess infan-
tile excitation, is matched by an other libido that is not exclusively
passive but is worked through with support from a stable link with
the object that founds psychic interiority and the link with others.
The hypothesis I am putting forward, that the feminine position of
both sexes—and particularly the little girl’s—is immediately ac-
companied by the phallic experience in the primary oedipal phase,
presupposes a bisexuality from the beginnings of the psyche. Is it
not precisely this feminine position, taking shape from the primary
oedipal phase, more violently than the castration anxiety that,
strictly, appears in the phallic phase, that underlies the fact that the
female is “the more inaccessible”, in Freud’s words, to both sexes
(cf. Freud, 1937c)? The female constitutes the first working out of
the infant’s phobias—fears of passivization, of narcissistic and
masochistic regression, of losing the visible reference points of
identity through a sensory engulfment that risks dispersing the
subject into an endogenous if not pathological autism—and it is
repressed by the subsequent accession to the phallic.
In the woman, however, the polymorphous femininity of the pri-
mary oedipal phase remains a continent that is scarcely repressed.
More precisely, it becomes masked by reactional femininity and the
attendant displays of beautification or narcissistic reparation with
which the woman’s later phallicism reacts to the castration com-
plex. It is in the course of the phallic phase, which situates the
subject in the oedipal triangulation between the ages of three and
five years, that the female subject carries out a further psychic
mutation by which the choice of sexual identity is definitively
accomplished.
There is a widespread view that so readily pictures psy-
choanalysis as a “biologization of the essence of man” that it is
worth reminding ourselves at this point that the psychoanalytic
theory of sexuality is a theory of the copresence of sexuality with
thought. Optimal frustration, mother–child separation, the depres-
sive position, lack, primary identification, sublimation, idealiza-
tion, attainment of the ego ideal and the superego are only a few
well-known stages by which the subject is positioned in the web of
both energy and meaning, both excitability and law, that character-
izes human sexuality in the analytic perspective. The phallic phase
constitutes its exemplary experience, which I have for this very
reason termed a “phallic kairos”, the Greek term kairos evoking a
mythic encounter or a fated parting. How is this encounter organ-
ized?
48 JULIA KRISTEVA
Following neurobiological maturation and optimal experiences

of separation from the object, the phallic stage becomes the central
organizer of the copresence of sexuality and thought in both sexes.
Having already developed language and thought, the child, not
satisfied with cathecting his genital organs and their excitability,
associates the cognitive operations that he applies to the external
world with the interior movements of his drive excitability. An
equivalence emerges between the pleasure of the phallic organ and
access to language and to the functioning of speech and thought. At
this stage of development, the subject in formation is able to estab-
lish that the father is not only the person he wants to kill in order to
appropriate the mother. From now on, he perceives what must be
termed the father’s separability: as a third figure, regulating the
sensorial mother–child dyad, the father becomes a symbolic father,
authority of prohibition and of the law. As bearer of the penis, the
little boy’s cathexis of this organ of pleasure is only strengthened
by the fact that it is first and foremost the father’s, whose organiz-
ing role in his familial and psychic world the child is now in a
position to recognize. Many authors have noted the specific fea-
tures that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become
the phallus—that is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but
also of desire and the desire to signify: all the components that
make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and
narcissistically recognized, erectile and laden with great erogenous
sensitivity, detachable and thus “culpable”,3 capable of being
lost—the penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for
difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the
basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic
maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual com-
puter.
For the little girl as well, a decisive encounter [kairos] between
the mastery of signs and sexual excitation fuses her being as a
thinking and desiring subject. It is no longer oral or anal excitation
but principally clitoral excitation, with or without the perception
of the vagina, that predominates at this period that we will call
the secondary oedipal phase and in which, unlike the boy, the little
girl changes object: the father replaces the mother as the target of
desire.
The ambiguity of the female secondary oedipal phase
Let us examine, however, the ambiguity of this change. On the one

hand, like the boy, and like all subjects of speech, of thought and
law, the girl identifies with the phallus and with the father who
represents it: without this phallic assumption she would be unable
to maintain her role in the universal human condition, a condition
that makes her a speaking being according to the law. At the heart
of this phallic position, however, the girl is at a comparative disad-
vantage to the boy. Deprived of a penis and devalued by this fact in
all known patriarchal and patrilineal cultures, she adheres to the
phallic order while carrying the unconscious trace of the primary
oedipal phase, of its polymorphous sensoriality, dedicated to desire
for the mother, which imprints on her an indelible mark of endog-
enous female homosexuality. From then on, the girl accomplishes
her access to the phallic order—constructed on the depths of the
“dark” or “Minoan–Mycenaean” continent—within the “as-if”, il-
lusory modality of “I am playing the game, but I know very well
that I am not part of it because I do not have it.” Accordingly, unless
the woman freezes the phallic position in the pose of the virago, the
feminine phallic position then establishes the female subject in the
register of radical strangeness, of an intrinsic exclusion, of an irrepa-
rable solitude.
Furthermore, as if this necessary but artificial phallicism were
not already conflictual enough to accept, it then has to be modu-
lated by a new psychic position for which the primary oedipal phase
has already prepared the way but which is accomplished only
during the secondary oedipal phase: as a phallic subject of speech,
thought, and the law, the girl falls back not on the passive position,
as is usually suggested, but on the receptive position to become the
object of the father. As a speaking being, she is a phallic subject of the
social symbolic order; but as a woman she nevertheless desires to
receive the penis and obtain a child from the father, from the place
of the mother with whom she is constantly settling the scores of the
original coexcitation in the primary oedipal phase.
By tracing the twists and turns required of the female subject by
her accession to the secondary oedipal phase, we can understand the
irreducible strangeness that a woman feels in the phallic–symbolic
50 JULIA KRISTEVA
order, and which leads to a display of anxiety or conversion symp-

toms in the hysteric when she settles for denial of the phallus and
of castration. At best, this strangeness takes on the aspect of an anti-
authoritarian dissatisfaction that is incomprehensible to social ra-
tionality; hence, “what do women want?”—the insistent question
that Freud is not alone in having posed. But this strangeness can be
refined into revolt or insubordination, which Hegel acclaimed in
women as the eternal irony of the community. If this exile that
establishes the woman in the phallic–symbolic universe happens to
turn out to be more irreconcilable, it can shift into chronic
depressivity or even intractable melancholia. Alternatively, it can
lead to anorexia and bulimia, those failed suicidal consequences of
the “rejection of femininity” (that of the primary oedipal phase en-
countering the rejection of castration with which the hysteric reacts
to the secondary oedipal phase), equally morbid symptoms in which
the gaping excitability of the (passively erotized) cavernous body
of the primary oedipal phase is accentuated, incapable of defending
itself against the intrusion of the maternal–paternal seduction ex-
cept by force-feeding or filling the erogenous zones.
By contrast, when the female subject manages to negotiate the
complex turnstile imposed on her by the primary and secondary
oedipal phases, she can have the good fortune to acquire that
strange maturity that the man so often lacks, buffeted as he is
between the phallic pose of the “macho” and the infantile regres-
sion of the “impossible Mr Baby”. With the benefit of this matu-
rity, the woman is able to encounter her child not as a phallic or
narcissistic substitute (which it mostly is) but as the real presence
of the other, perhaps for the first time, unless it is the only possible
one, and with which civilization begins as a totality of connections
based no longer on Eros but on its sublimation in Agape (Kristeva,
2001).
Freud, who thought that only “a small minority” of human
beings were capable of “displacing what they mainly value from
being loved on to loving” (1930a, p. 291), interpreted this sublima-
tion as a defence against object loss, without deciphering in addi-
tion to this a working through of narcissistic love, as suggested by
the Biblical and evangelical injunction to “love thy neighbour as
thyself”. He was more than willing to admit that it was mystics
such as Francis of Assisi who “went furthest” in the “interior life”

created by such methods, but he stressed that this interiority “with
an inhibited aim” (p. 291), this “evenly suspended, steadfast and
affectionate feeling”, bore, however, “little external resemblance
[any more to the stormy agitations of genital love]” (p. 291). Had he
forgotten, in saying this, to consider motherhood? In fact, the
founder of psychoanalysis separates this “work of civilization” (p.
293) that entails the “readiness for a universal love of mankind” (p.
291) from the “interests of the family” to which women commit
themselves, criticizing these women who had nevertheless “laid
the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love” (p. 293)
for being incapable of a “work of civilization” on the grounds of an
incapacity for instinctual sublimation (p. 55). Had he perhaps not
analysed the experience of motherhood enough? When the mother
manages to go beyond the dominion over the child as a phallic
substitute and to calm the intensity of the link with others, beyond
the time of desire which is that of death, the cyclical time of
renewal and rebirth opens up for her.
The female and femininity

Henceforth, this woman is no longer playing a game of masquer-
ade, however amusing and attractive, which constructs femininity
as a simulacrum of the female. She has metabolized the cavernous
receptivity of the primary oedipal phase into a psychic depth: this is
the female. She is aware, however, of the femininity that knows how
to pretend in order to protect itself from the female, by excelling at
seduction and even in masculine competition. What we perceive as
a harmonious feminine personality is one that manages to create a
coexistence between the female and femininity, receptivity and
seduction, acceptance and performance—a “mental hermaphro-
dite”, diagnoses Colette. This calm polyphony of flexible connec-
tions confers a peaceful social and historical existence on the
lacunar female of the origins. That is to say, in effect, that Woman
does not exist: rather, there is a plurality of versions of femininity,
and the female community is only ever one of women in the
singular.
52 JULIA KRISTEVA
NOTES
Translated from French by Sophie Leighton, MA (Oxon), MA (Sussex).
1. It is worth mentioning here that it does not follow from the fact that
everything that is analysable is sexual that everything sexual is accessible to
analysis. What is not drained off by phallic mediation would in fact be the
entire current of maternal instinct. (Cf. Lacan, 1966, p. 730.)
2. Cf. Jacques André’s (1995) commentary and discussions.
3. Translator’s note: there is a pun in the French “coupable”, which implies
“cuttable” [coup-able] as well as “culpable” here.
REFERENCES
André, J. (1995). Aux origines féminines de la sexualité. Paris: PUF.
Andreas-Salomé, L. (1980). L’Amour du narcissisme. Paris: Gallimard.
Anzieu, D. (1985). Le Moi-Peau, Paris, Dunod. The Skin Ego (trans. C.
Turner). New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1989.
Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E., 7.
Freud, S. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria,
S.E., 7.
Freud, S. (1919e). A child is being beaten. S.E., 19.
Freud, S. (1923e). The infantile genital organisation. S.E., 19.
Freud, S. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical
distinction between the sexes. S.E., 19.
Freud, S. (1930a). Civilization and Its Discontents. S.E., 21.
Freud, S. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E., 23.
Kristeva, J. (1996a). Encore l’Œdipe, ou le monisme phallique. In: Sens
et non-sens de la révolte (pp. 141–195). Paris: Fayard, 1996.
Kristeva, J. (1996b). De l’étrangeté du phallus ou le féminin entre
illusion et désillusion. In: Sens et non-sens de la révolte (pp. 197–223).
Paris: Fayard.
Kristeva, J. (2001). De la passion selon la maternité. In: La Vie amoureuse
(Convention of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, November
2000). Revue française de psychanalyse, Débats de psychanalyse (July):
105–120.
Lacan, J. (1966). Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité
féminine. In Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Laplanche, J. (1987). Nouveaux Fondements pour la psychanalyse: La
séduction originaire. Paris: PUF.
CHAPTER FOUR
Phallacies of binary reasoning:

drive beyond gender
Paul Verhaeghe
T
aking Julia Kristeva’s chapter as a starting point, I would
like to embroider on a number of ideas in her work. Like
her, I agree that woman, or the feminine component of
human sexuality, cannot be understood in terms of passivity. On
the contrary, I will argue that femininity is more open to the
symbolic than to the real. In this type of discussion, a form of
binary reasoning is always in attendance in one way or another. As
I read her chapter and her latest work, Kristeva is still attempting
to take leave from it, but she does not completely succeed in this.
Each of us continues to wrestle with this inheritance of our patriar-
chal social system. Here I will discuss three critical propositions
concerning this dualism and how it affects our conception of gen-
der. I will then advance four theses designed, in some measure, to
provide an answer to them.
My propositions regarding the gender/sex binary are as fol-
lows. First, classical dualism in general—and the division between
anatomical sex and psychosexual identity in particular—imply an
endless mirroring that necessitates a final or ultimate element the
function of which is to provide an ostensibly final ground and an
ontology. Second, this dualistic mirroring process lends itself to a
53
54 PAUL VERHAEGHE
number of problematic analogies. Third, the focus on the phallus

and masculinity itself is an artefact of this type of thinking.
1. Ever since Plato, Western thought has imposed some form of

binary thinking in which two elements are opposed to one another:
soma versus psyche, matter versus form, nature versus culture,
semiotic versus symbolic, primary oedipal versus secondary oedi-
pal, sex versus gender, masculine versus feminine. The system is
created in such a way that it requires one final element to close and
ground the binary. Without it, the system runs mad in an incessant
mirroring process of ever more remote underlying elements, each
resembling the other. This can easily be illustrated by a well-
known critique of homunculus theory: a man’s headache is caused
by a headache in a smaller man inside his head, indicating that this
smaller man must have an even smaller man in his brain with a
headache, meaning than an even smaller man in the head of the
smaller man must have a headache, and so on (Lacan, 1946, pp.
160–161, 1998, pp. 96–100).1
For Aristotle, this final element was the unmoveable sphere,
which was later interpreted as God: and, what is more, God the
Holy Father. We can detect the same process in Freud, who was
obliged to construct his myth of the primal father to ground the
oedipal father. At the level of the subject, this has an ontological
effect: through identification with the father, the subject copes with
the drive and its divisive effects. Identity is experienced as substan-
tial, authentic, pre-discursive, and so forth: “That’s me!”—al-
though, of course, it is not. It is a socially induced way of coping
with the unbearable lightness of being.
This form of reasoning furthermore implies a presumed iden-
tity between the two terms. The psyche mirrors the body and must
therefore be identical with this body. But in relation to the ground-
ing term, this identity implies a reduction: the subject is con-
structed according to the image of God, albeit in a lesser form; the
child is the image of the father, albeit in a lesser form; and so on. In
other words, the apparent correspondence between the two ele-
ments of binary thought is nothing but an imaginary implementa-
tion of the mirror stage through which the child acquires a
hypothetical identity and unity from the big Other, if always in
a slightly “lesser” form. As regards gender, this gives rise to a
PHALLACIES OF BINARY REASONING 55
particular reading of the phallus (see Point 3), as the missing

element the presence of which would complete the subject and
permit it to attain the status of the father. No wonder, then, that
there is a confusion of the father and the phallus, as the former
needs the latter to take up his position.
2. My second point concerns the analogies that this type of binary

reasoning induces. When we examine the original binary of bio-
logical sex versus psychosexual identity, it is clear that gender and
constructivism have had the upper hand right from the start.
Psychosexual identity is considered an effect of discourse, inde-
pendent of the biological body that from then on can be discarded.
Nevertheless, it did not take long for the original division between
sex and gender to reappear in gender itself—more specifically, in
the division of feminine and masculine identity. Woman became
aligned with nature and the real, man stood for culture and dis-
course, and the same discussion resumed. In both binaries—the
original sex/gender and the ensuing feminine/masculine within
gender—one term appears to be the primary one. Thus considered,
the introduction of the idea of gender as a solution turns out to be
nothing but another formulation of the same problem within the
same dual line of reasoning.
Closer scrutiny of the list of the usual binaries (nature/culture,
etc.), moreover, reveals a number of curious analogies based on the
patriarchal way of thinking from which we have not yet suffi-
ciently extricated ourselves. It seems as if woman stands for nature,
drive, body, semiotic, and so on, and man for culture, symbolic,
psyche, and so forth. Yet this is not confirmed by day-to-day
experience, nor by clinical practice. Both feminine eroticism and
feminine identity seem far more attracted to the symbolic than are
their masculine counterparts. Biblically or not, woman conceives
for the most part by the ear and is seduced by words. In contrast, an
unmediated, drive-ridden sexuality seems much more characteris-
tic of masculine eroticism, whether gay or straight. Nor does moth-
erhood’s apparent linking of woman and Nature stand the test. In
my clinical practice, I have seen far too many mothers who reject
their children or—even worse—have no interest in them whatso-
ever. The maternal instinct is a myth, and maternal love is an effect
of an obligatory alienation. Many new mothers must face the fact
56 PAUL VERHAEGHE
that their reactions to their new baby fail to coincide with this
anticipated love.
3. The presumed connection between masculinity and the sym-

bolic is the result of a certain reading of the phallus, which brings
me to my third point. The exclusive focus on the phallus and its
accompanying privileging of man misses the point and is again an
artefact of the reasoning itself. As we saw previously, in binary
thought, the two terms require a supreme or grounding term that
provides them with substantiality. The fullness of the supreme
term involves the presence of an exceptional characteristic missing
from the ordinary terms. For Aristotle, this came down to the
immovability of the supreme sphere. In gender, it is called the
phallus. Freud put this down to the absence of a penis in women;
the early Lacan interpreted this as the lack of a signifier to signify
femininity. The later Lacan makes it clear that the phallic interpre-
tation of this lack is, once again, an artefact of a patriarchal thinking
that is founded on the master discourse.
Clinical practice testifies to the fact that the only phallus that
counts is the mother’s phallus—in other words, the missing phal-
lus. The sum of the mother plus the phallus would be the unbarred
or non-lacking Other—that is, the phallic mother. Consequently,
the phallus is always lacking, it is the One Thing that is not
mirrored during the constitution of the subject. The reason is very
simple: the Other also lacks the phallus, so there is no question of
mirroring it.
Such a concentration on the phallic is not very helpful, either for
a man or for a woman. As a focal point, it belongs to the range of
psychopathology. A man will never meet the phallic standard; the
only result is an ever-increasing alienation because of the other’s
assumed phallic demand. Under normal—that is, neurotic—condi-
tions, this leads to the typically masculine form of hysteria: the
Guinness-Book-of-Records hysteria, with its emphasis on the big-
gest instrument. One step further, his desperate attempts to fuse
with woman land us in the perverse structure (Lacan, 1974). That
is, man identifies with the missing maternal phallus in a desperate
attempt to make her whole. For woman, attempting to receive the
phallus ends either in the phallic masquerade of the woman, or in
maternity—as Freud long ago made clear—although the emphasis

must be more on pregnancy than on maternity, which already
contains a loss. Where woman tries to unite with the phallic master
himself, the result is mysticism or psychosis (Lacan, 1974, p. 63).
In both cases, whether masculine or feminine, an endless Encore
is put into play as an attempt to master what is lost. As we will
see, this encore, which typifies the repetition compulsion, increas-
ingly endorses the very problem it attempts to solve, providing an
admirable illustration of the circular effects of this kind of binary
thinking.
* * *
These are my three critical propositions regarding the gender/sex
dualism. In answer to them, I would like to develop four theses.
First, I aim to show how the main problem confronting the ques-
tion of sex and gender is in fact the drive and its antinomical aims.
In this respect, Freud’s original conceptualization of Eros and
Thanatos will prove indispensable. Second, within the dynamics of
the drive, gender is discovered to be a secondary issue, along with
castration. Third, in place of the binary dualism I propose to
substitute a circular, non-reciprocal relationship between two ele-
ments, which are themselves less important than the representative
relationship. Fourth, to the extent that a binary differentiation can
be made, the main elements are considered not masculine/femi-
nine but active and passive and are understood as such in the
relation between the subject and the drive.
1. It is striking how little attention has been paid to the drive and
to sexuality in contemporary gender studies. Freud himself pro-
vides us with two main points of entry: on the one hand we have
the component or partial drives, most evident in clinical practice,
which supply us with a direct link to sexuality. The aim of these
partial drives is to recover and rejoin a supposedly original object
through its different pregenital forms. By itself, the study of the
partial drives is already enough to show the relative unimportance
of the question of gender—there is no genital partial drive as such,
the focus is on the various different bodily orifices. Nevertheless,
what seems far more interesting to me is the second Freudian
58 PAUL VERHAEGHE
approach—namely, his concepts of the life and death drives, Eros

and Thanatos.
With these concepts, Freud addresses the question of the funda-
mental aim of the drive or, to be more specific, the fundamental
aim of the drive’s primary element—that is, its driving force. In
answer to this, he postulates the existence of two primary drives
the aim of which is to return to a previous state (Freud, 1920g). The
problem is that each drive aims at an opposite state, with the result
that they work against each other.
The easiest one to understand is the Eros or life drive, which
attempts to return to a previous stage of wholeness and fusion by
linking together as many elements as possible, with coitus as the
most salient example. It is striking how, even in Freud, the relation
between Eros and the symbolic is clearly visible, together with its
effect on identity formation. Freud first encountered it in his Studies
on Hysteria, where he called it “false connections”: a word-presen-
tation is wrongly associated with another word-presentation for
lack of an original, accurate association with something that is
inexpressible (Freud, 1895d, pp. 67–70). He generalized this ten-
dency, which he called the “hysterical compulsion to associate”.
Later, he was to encounter a variation of this compulsion: the
repetition compulsion, a primary characteristic of traumatic neuro-
sis, which attempts to master the real by binding it to word-
presentations (1920g). Consequently he could no longer restrict it
to hysteria but had to turn it into a general characteristic of the
ego—that is, its proclivity to synthesis, to associate separate things
into an ever larger synthesis, the One of phallic fusion.
The problem is that this Eros drive never succeeds in reaching
its final goal. The failure of the pleasure principle has to do with the
other drive: Thanatos, or the death drive, and its opposing aim. The
death drive works against the tendency towards synthesis and
induces a scattering of Eros. It disassembles everything that Eros
brought together into One and makes this unity explode into an
infinite universe. Moreover, this other drive works in silence; it has
no connection whatsoever with the symbolic or the signifier
(Freud, 1923b, p. 46, p. 56).
In our post-Freudian era, the concepts of the life and death
drives have almost entirely disappeared. One of the reasons has to
do with their names, which are misleading in their imaginary
signification effect. As we will see, considering them from another

perspective, one could just as easily say that the life drive aims
towards death and the death drive towards life. Freud himself
referred to another classic couple that implies a different significa-
tion effect—that is, Philia [love] and Neikos [strife]. By this it is clear
that he is referring to something that supersedes mankind as such,
something that must have to do with the bare properties of life
(Freud, 1937c, p. 246).
For me, this opposition does indeed have to do with the ques-
tion of origins—more specifically, the origins of sexually differenti-
ated life forms. The original state to which Eros tries to return is the
eternal life, the classic Greek Zoë, dating from before the introduc-
tion of sexually differentiated life forms through the particular
form of cell division, meiosis. In principle, sexually undifferentiated
forms of life possess eternal life; death is an accident for them. After
the introduction of sexual differentiation, however, death becomes
a structural necessity. Interpreted in this way, Eros or Zoë aims at
a return to a previous sexually undifferentiated state by fusing
with the supposedly lost element. The price paid for this return is
the disappearance of a sexually differentiated individual in the
fusion; it must die so as to make the return possible.
This explains the opposite tendency: aiming at the continuation
of life as an individual through defusion from the originally undif-
ferentiated whole. The continuation of this form of life is always
limited, because of the structural necessity of death, as introduced
by sexual differentiation. Freud’s Thanatos drive ensures the con-
tinuation of individual life against its disappearance in the other.
Interpreted in this way, the death drive is a bios drive, bios being
the ancient Greek name for the individual life that dies but also for
how an individual conducts his or her own life. Zoë, on the other
hand, is eternal life itself: the thread that runs through the limited
bios and is not broken when the particular perishes. Read in this
way, Freud’s Eros is a Zoë drive, and Thanatos is a bios drive.
As I said, this antinomy in the drive is much more fundamental
than the gender antinomy, which is itself a consequence of it. But
before going into this, I shall address the question of the relation
between the drive and identity formation. Reading Freud, it is clear
that he links the formation of the ego to Eros and its tendency
towards synthesis. This idea is confirmed both in Lacan’s theory of
60 PAUL VERHAEGHE
subject-formation and by contemporary attachment studies.2 With-

out going too far into this, let me just say that identity formation is
based on the very same motives as those governing the two drives
and implies the very same antinomy. Moreover, this connection
permits us to discern a logical time sequence.
The child is born with an innate tendency to stick to the other as
closely as possible. This is why primary anxiety concerns the sepa-
ration from this other. As a result of this tendency, the child
incorporates and identifies with as many parts of the other as
possible, thus trying to bridge the gap caused by birth. In the
meantime, identity is acquired, which in my reading is an effect of
Eros. Once this process has sufficiently taken place within a secure
environment, the other tendency becomes patent, actively aiming
for diffusion and autonomy from this other. It is not by chance that
this takes place simultaneously with language acquisition and par-
ticularly with the emergence of the signifier “I” during the so-
called period of negation. This is an effect of the Thanatos drive,
privileging separation this time and a life of one’s own. These two
tendencies will continue to function alongside one another in a
peculiar way, which will not be very well understood if we con-
tinue to name it “dualism”. Even for Freud, the two basic drives
were almost always commingled in what he called the “Trieb-
mischung”. We return to this admixture in my third thesis, but let
us now address the relationship between the primary drives and
gender.
2. My second thesis reverses this relationship. The drive is not

one element within the problem of gender; on the contrary, gender
is just one expression of the larger problem of the drive. My thesis
is that gender and sexuality are an attempt to regain the original
Eros fusion, albeit in such a way that failure is structurally built in.
This is beautifully expressed in Aristophanes’ well-known fable
in Plato’s Symposium. Reading the whole story, it is clear how
gender and even sex enter the picture only at a secondary stage,
being absent from the first part. Indeed, once the original double
being was bisected, each half was perpetually searching for its
corresponding half, but not, as we might think, for the purpose of
having sex:
Now, when the work of bisection was complete, it left each half
with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together
and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for
nothing better than to be rolled into one. So much so, that they
began to die of hunger and general inertia, for neither would
do anything without the other. [Plato, 1994, pp. 543–544]
Zeus took pity on them and introduced yet another change to their
bodies: he moved their reproductive organs to the front (originally,
they were placed on the outer side of the body), thus making sexual
intercourse possible. This change, particularly the subsequent pos-
sibility for genital union, temporarily set the human being free
from its longing and made it possible for it to turn to the activities
necessary for survival.
The beauty of this fable is that the transition thus described is
not from a “rounded whole” to a bisection into a male and female
differentiation, but from a rounded whole into two parts (of what-
ever gender), with a total longing for one another that renders all
other considerations insignificant. The genital–sexual interest en-
ters the scene at a later stage, turning the original total process into
a partial one because of the lethal nature of this first process. Both
gender and genital sex are a secondary although necessary issue, a
kind of desperate solution for a primal division—this is Plato’s
message.
Looking at this fable from the perspective described above, it is
clear that it corresponds perfectly with our previous thesis. The
loss of eternal life is the loss of an original wholeness and simulta-
neously implies a gender differentiation. The solution for this loss
is sought in phallic copulation; moreover, the original loss can be
secondarily interpreted as a phallic loss or castration. The paradox
of this solution is that this attempt re-endorses the original prob-
lem. Indeed, the differentiation into two different genders is pre-
cisely the cause of the problem. Trying to solve it through this
gender differentiation is nothing but a repetition of the original
loss. The net result is a never-ending repetition, because each
phallic act repeats the loss and makes another attempt necessary—
hence Lacan’s stress on the “Encore” effect. One can even say that
phallic sexuality in itself is aim-inhibited because it can never reach
the original aim of enduring fusion.
62 PAUL VERHAEGHE
It is instructive to reconsider the theory of the phallus and of

castration in this respect. The foundation of human fantasy is
that—if one did indeed possess The Phallus—it should be possible
the reinstate the original union through The Perfect Sexual Rela-
tionship. Yet the phallus in itself is nothing but a reformulation of
an original loss that was caused precisely by the introduction of
phallic sexuality. As such, the phallus creates the illusion of a
solution while at the same time reintroducing it. Whatever solution
there might be, it has to be looked for beyond the phallic imagi-
nary.
If we return now to the relationship between the primary drives
and gender differentiation, it can be said that the latter is a conse-
quence of the death drive and its proclivity for defusion. Further-
more, it makes death necessary for every sexually differentiated
individual life form. Sexual fusion and copulation are a conse-
quence of Eros and are attempts to annihilate the differentiation.
The relation between gender and drive is secondary, but neverthe-
less at a primary level—that is, male and female as prior to mascu-
line and feminine—there must be some kind of link. It is as though
the female had lost the male part and needs it in order to become
whole again. This explains the female proclivity for fusion and Eros
(and her propensity for the symbolic). The result is penetration and
the swelling up of pregnancy, an attempt at fusion. Separation
must be avoided. The male part, on the other hand, has differenti-
ated itself from the original alma mater, hence its proclivity for
separation and Thanatos: fusion must be avoided. The result is
penetration and deflation. We find an echo of this in Freud’s paper
on the theme of the three caskets where he talks about the three
women in man’s life: the woman that gives birth to him, the
woman he makes love to, and the woman to whom he returns after
death (Freud, 1913f, p. 291).
The same line of reasoning can be expanded to psychopathol-
ogy. There is an evident link between Eros, fusion, identification,
hysteria, and femininity, just as there is a link between Thanatos,
separation, isolation, obsessional neurosis, and masculinity. Of
course this may sound dreadfully politically incorrect [mais ça
n’empêche pas d’exister, dirait Charcot3], but things are even more
complicated than this. As I said above, gender differentiation is a
secondary item that ought not to be interpreted in a binary fashion.

On the contrary, male and female are always combined, just like
Eros and Thanatos, and it is the peculiarity of this combination that
gets neglected in binary studies of it. This brings me to my third
thesis.
3. The life and death drives are not two separate entities. What
Freud called the “Triebmischung”, the admixture of the drives, boils
down to a circular but non-reciprocal interaction between two
elements. One operates as a force of attraction for the other, which
simultaneously tries to return and move forward. Their interaction
is staged on a different level each time, which establishes and
reiterates the fact that there is no reciprocal relationship between
them.4
First, we have the appearance of the sexually differentiated life
forms at the moment of birth. This implies the loss of the eternal
life, Zoë. It functions as a force of attraction for the individual life,
the Bios, that tries to return. The price that is to be paid for this
return is the loss of individual life as such, and this explains the
other tendency, the one that flees from it in the opposite direction.
The usual solution reiterates the original problem, thus maintain-
ing the interaction. Indeed, the Bios tries to join the Zoë through
sexual reproduction, which involves a repetition of the original
loss.
Second, we have the formation of the I—that is, the primary
identification of the mirror stage. The living being acquires an
initial identity through the unified image of his body coming to
him from the Other, but at the same time this “I” loses the real of its
body: hence its never-ending attempts to join its body again but,
conversely, the price to be paid for this fusion would be the disap-
pearance of the “I”—hence the tendency to flee in the other direc-
tion as well. Finally, the solution will only provide the “I” with the
body as prescribed by the Other, thus confirming the loss of its
being.
Third, we have the arrival of the subject. The subject attempts to
fuse with the (m)Other, but if it were to succeed, the result would
imply a total alienation, meaning the disappearance of the subject.
Hence the other tendency towards separation. Again, this solution
64 PAUL VERHAEGHE
implies a structurally impossible relationship, because the subject’s

attempts to fuse with the Other necessarily must pass through the
symbolic, thus repeating and endorsing the original deadlock.
If we continue this series, we arrive at a fourth moment wherein
the subject acquires a gender identity. This is what the Oedipus
complex does, in its own peculiar way—that is, by interpreting the
original loss in terms of castration. This phallic interpretation will
be applied retroactively to all preceding occurrences, meaning that
each loss is read in a phallic way. This process entails the construc-
tion of the body—not the body we are, but the body we have, which
is clothed in a gender identity. This identity is the final stage of this
circular but non-reciprocal relationship. The original gap between
life and death, between the body and the I, between the subject and
the Other is reproduced and worked over in the gap between man
and woman.
Moreover, this repetition produces the same effect: no matter
what efforts the subject makes to fuse his body by way of the
symbolic, s/he will never succeed, because the gap is due precisely
to the symbolic. Regardless of the masculine subject’s efforts to
fuse with woman by way of the phallic relationship, he will never
succeed, because the gap is due precisely to the phallic signifier.
The double-sided relationship between subject and drive reap-
pears in the very same kind of relationship between a man and a
woman.
4. More often than not, this relationship is conceived as a conflict,

with patriarchy and female emancipation the landmarks of this
battle. In light of what we saw above, this battle is just one expres-
sion of the way the two primary drives relate to one another in
every subject. This brings me to my final thesis. Rather than inter-
preting this opposition as masculine versus feminine, it is much
more illuminating to read it as active versus passive. However, this
does not imply that passive represents feminine and active mascu-
line. Freud describes a “drive for mastery” through which the
subject tries to master the object. Both man and woman fear being
reduced to the passive object of enjoyment of the Other because
such a reduction entails the disappearance of a separate existence.
As a result, every subject actively strives for independence and
autonomy. At the same time, however, everyone—whether mascu-

line or feminine—aims to fuse with the lost part and be reduced to
its passive object. This explains why every subject suffers from
separation anxiety as well.
The resulting ambivalence is present in every individual as the
expression of the two primary drives. Its enactment between two
different subjects, whatever their biological sex, is indeed an enact-
ment of a more original problem. For as long as we can fight with
our partner, we need not address our inner division. . . .
* * *
By way of conclusion, let us return to the original problem. The
tendency towards mastery and the fear of passivity has to do with
our anxiety about death. All human activity, sexual or not, is
directed against our final disappearance into the unknown, beyond
the Symbolic.
NOTES
Julia Kristeva could not, at short notice and due to family reasons, person-
ally attend the conference in Stockholm. Mariam Alizade, president of
COWAP, presented a summary of her paper, and the full paper was distributed
to all the participants. Due to the circumstances the organizers of the Confer-
ence asked Paul Verhaeghe not only to comment on Kristeva’s paper but also to
present his own ideas. [I.M.]
1. The page numbers refer to the original French edition, included in the
English translation.
2. For Lacan, see his theory on the mirror stage and on alienation and
separation. For the attachment theory, see Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target
(2002).
3. “But that doesn’t stop it from existing”, Charcot would have said.
4. For a more detailed discussion, see Verhaeghe (2001), pp. 65–133.
REFERENCES
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation,
Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. New York: Other
Press.
66 PAUL VERHAEGHE
Freud, S. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. S.E., 2.

Freud, S. (1913f). The theme of the three caskets. S.E., 12.
Freud, S. (1920g). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E., 18.
Freud, S. (1923b). The Ego and The Id. S.E., 19.
Lacan, J. (1946). Propos sur la causalité psychique. In: Ecrits (pp. 151–
193). Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Lacan, J. (1974). Télévision. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore (1972–
73). In: J. A. Miller (Ed.), On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love
and Knowledge. New York: Norton.
Plato (1994). The Collected Dialogues. In: E. Hamilton & H. Cairns
(Eds.), Bollingen Series, LXXI (pp. 543–544). Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Verhaeghe, P. (2001). Beyond Gender. From Subject to Drive. New York:
Other Press.
CHAPTER FIVE
The difference between gender

and sexual difference
Juliet Mitchell
I
n Monika Treut’s film My Father Is Coming (1990), as he drives
along, the hero repeatedly muses about his face in the car
mirror. He shows a young woman a photograph: “Is that your
sister?” she asks; “closer than that”, he replies. Brothers and sisters
represent the minimal distance between people that must be pre-
served if incest is to be avoided. The photograph is not of the hero’s
sister: it is of himself before he had a “sex-change” operation. I
want to suggest that the term “gender” has come to prominence (at
least in the Anglo-Saxon world) even within psychoanalytic dis-
course because what is being described is not the maximal differ-
ence between mothers and fathers but the minimal difference of
sibling sexual relations, which themselves are only a shade away
from a narcissistic economy in which the other is the self: “closer
than that”. Treut’s transgendered hero can stand as an icon of how
psychically and physically close siblings can be.
I shall argue that “sexual difference”—the correct term for
psychoanalytic understanding of masculinity and femininity—im-
plicates reproduction. “Gender”, which is now used indiscrimi-
nately, has been deployed unwittingly to express a sexuality that is
not primarily or predominantly procreative. Sibling relations may
67
68 JULIET MITCHELL
be—indeed, in some circumstances, such as Ptolemaic Egypt, must

be—reproductive, but I contend we should confine the word “gen-
der” to non-procreative sexuality, to sexuality that is bound up
with survival and hence violence. The prevalence of gender as a
concept, in my argument, has come about because since the 1960s,
dominant sexual modes in the West have been non-reproductive.
Though it may seem to be stretching the point, I would include in
this observation the new reproductive technologies, which seem to
me to be in some ways about gender relations rather than sexual
difference.
It is not, of course, a case of the reproductive and sexual drive
economies being distinct in real life—but I believe that it will help
us to understand a number of phenomena if we separate them
analytically. As Freud wrote in another context, in the clinical
situation the colours are blurred; after we have made them distinct
like a primitive painting for the purposes of analytical understand-
ing—we murder to dissect—we must allow them to merge together
again. For Freud, “reproduction” is impregnated with sexuality
because it is the result of channelling the explosiveness of sexuality
into oedipal desires and then repressing them. But reproduction
within psychoanalytic theory—and more generally—constantly
slips back into an ideology of an asexual dynamic. This asexuality
probably arises because (again, in the modern Western world)
reproduction is linked to women. Mothers—even wives, and
women generally—are not seen psychologically as subjects of de-
sire. In the ideology women either have too much sexuality or none
at all. The Victorian idyll of woman as asexual mother can be taken
as the icon of reproduction.
Confining “sexual difference” to the construction of reproduc-
tive relations and “gender” to the wider category of sexuality must,
then, not be taken in an absolute sense. Yet, despite this caution, I
believe the distinction is useful in a number of ways, not least
because it helps to explain the question André Green (1995) ad-
dressed to psychoanalysis: “What has happened to sexuality?” and
to return us to sexuality’s insistent, if neglected, history. I shall
contend that the clinical and theoretical subjugation of sexuality to
reproduction is a hidden version of the repudiation of sexuality
itself. Such a subjugation, which, Freud argued, was central to each
and every deviation from psychoanalysis from Jung onwards, is, of
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 69
course, what is supposed to happen (at least hitherto) in human

history: the polymorphously perverse infant must be transformed
into the post-oedipal child. (This history overlooks deviants such as
Wilhelm Reich. In other words, either we argue that opposition to
psychoanalysis is opposition to sexuality, or we ignore the opposi-
tion of the psychoanalytic sexual radicals.)
What is more, our theory and practice may be moving away
from its focus on reproduction and sexual difference towards a
concern with gender, but at a time when the notion of gender has
itself become etiolated as far as sexuality is concerned. The histo-
rian Joan Scott writes of “gender” as a category of historical analy-
sis; what she writes is: “The use of gender emphasises an entire
system of relationships that may include sex, but it is not directly
determined by sex nor directly determining of sexuality” (Scott,
1996). For a psychoanalyst to first substitute gender for sexual
difference and then contemplate a notion of gender without sex or
sexuality at the centre must be problematic—yet that, I believe, is
what has happened. In proposing that we reconsider both “gen-
der” and “sexual difference”, one of my aims is to prevent us
slipping away into psychotherapies that find no key role for sexu-
ality in the construction of the psyche or ones that believe that
sexuality is only out there in the actual world of abuse. Siblings
show us just how crucial a force sexuality is in a psycho-social
dynamics.
Robert Stoller, the Californian psychoanalyst, notoriously intro-
duced the distinction between “sex” as the biological factor and
“gender” as the social contribution to a person’s being (Stoller,
1968). Feminist sociologists, such as Ann Oakley (1972) in Britain,
and anthropologists, such as Gayle Rubin (1975) in the United
States, adopted the distinction. As the distinction entered sociol-
ogy, the sexuality vanished. However, over recent decades “gen-
der” has shifted meaning and come also to stand for the
relationship between women and men (feminine and masculine;
female and male) in any given context and on a par with race: it can
thus have both a biological and a sociological dimension; this
restores a possible place for sexuality. While I see this as a useful
move, I think we need to try to specify “gender” further and we
need, too, to interrogate it in the interests of sexuality—not to let
sexuality slip out of the picture again. To do this, it is simpler to
70 JULIET MITCHELL
start with the concept it has largely replaced but which, I argue,
should be retained while being distinguished from it: the concept
of “sexual difference”.
When Jacques Lacan “returned” to Freud, it was, in this connec-
tion, to emphasize the castration complex—the psychic play of a
traumatic prohibition around which sexual difference came to be
symbolized. Female and male were both equally subject to the
possible loss of the phallus, but differently so. This distinct subjec-
tion depends on the future differences between mothers and fa-
thers. In all instances it is sexed reproduction that necessitates
psychic sexual difference—whether, as for some theorists, such
difference is introduced by God (Ernest Jones) or the biological
body or, as for others, it is enjoined by the conditions of human
sociality. All children fantasize making and giving birth to babies.
How our psyches construct the coming-to-knowledge of the post-
oedipal child that it takes two different beings—or, rather, two
beings whose differences are conceptualized to do this—is the condi-
tion of sexual difference.
Reproduction, in dominant discourses, is counted on the side of
the woman, and the fantasies we hear from patients or observe in
children endorse a preoccupation with the mother. If the child is
Oedipus, then it will be his mother who is the focus of attention.
The repeated claims that Freudian psychoanalysis is phallocentric
and patriarchal forget that the preoccupation with motherhood
with which it was hoped to counteract patriarchy is, instead, the
other side of the same coin. The recent attempt to make the mother
not the object of the baby’s needs and the child’s enquiries but,
instead, a subject in her own right and to see the task of the psyche
as one of subject–subject interaction corrects the subject–object of
oedipality and pre-oedipality, but only at the expense of taking
sexual difference for granted rather than as constructed with diffi-
culty. Where sexual difference is concerned, does not one sex
always take the other as its object? Is not that the point? Subject–
subject interaction, I contend, takes place in the zone of siblinghood
where “gender difference” also belongs.
Subject–subject interaction has long been the focus of feminist
analyses, as in Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological rendition
of Hegel. This subject–subject interaction is now attracting some
psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic attention. However, sexual
reproduction demands first the attraction and then the overcom-

ing, both in orgasm and in procreativity, of the otherness of the
other, so that the otherness of the other turns into “we are as one”.
That the feminine is constituted as in itself an object as a result of
the identifications that follow from the absence of the phallus as a
condition of the castration complex makes that fact a crucial prob-
lem for feminism. There seems to me no intrinsic reason why each
sex could not take the other as object in a more egalitarian manner.
But that is not my concern here. My point is simply that sexed
reproduction demands some conceptualization of sexual differ-
ence, which in turn entails both a subject–object dynamic and
heterosexuality. There are other ways of having a child, but not as
yet of procreating and giving birth to one.
As soon as Freud had discovered and formulated the Oedipus
complex, psychoanalytic theory entered the realm of “object rela-
tions”. And as the perspective was from the pre-oedipal or oedipal
child, the focus would inevitably become the mother as object.
From the very conditions of phallocentricity arose the focus on
female sexuality that, it had been hoped, would be its obverse.
Clinically we talk about our mothers: the effort to write about
fathers is an attempt to right the balance, to bring the reproductive
man in as object of our attentions. For this reason it has been male
hysteria—what happens to the boy’s wish to give birth—rather
than the female hysteric as a proto-feminist that has interested me.
The ego is a body ego—female/male bodies are different, mor-
phologically, hormonally, endocrinally, functionally—although, of
course, they are very much the same if we compare them with
giraffes. Sexual difference is not what leaps to mind when we first
look at most animals. However, for humans with regard to sexual
difference, the bodily difference is perceived representationally as
a reproductive difference. Eggs, sperm, menstruation, menopause,
vagina, clitoris, penis, womb, body-hair, voice timbre, pelvic
shape, height, weight, and size—whether or not they directly affect
different reproductive roles—are given their meaning in relation to
this: they contribute to the fantasies of sexual difference, to the
representations of women and men in their difference from each
other. So too do clothes, hair-cuts, verbal idioms, and a wide range
of other cross-culturally and socially various insignia. Our egos are
thus always sexed egos, and they are sexed around reproduction.
72 JULIET MITCHELL
The hysteric who has not taken on board sexual difference, nor that
it takes two different sexes to reproduce, is, to that degree, also
relatively ego-less, his “I” a wandering will-o’-the-wisp, “empty of
himself” or grandiose. This hysterical “mirror stage” precedes the
symbolization of sexual difference.
Sexual difference, reproductive difference, although it may find
a resting-place in biology, is no more “natural” than the ego of the
mirror stage: it is constructed as a representation; it is constructed
in the mirror of the other’s desire. Why, asks Freud, when male and
female are in all important respects alike, do we do so much to
differentiate them? The answer, surely, is in order to mark psychi-
cally the sexual difference of sexed reproduction.
I would argue, however, that there is no reproductive drive—
only reproductive fantasies. If reproduction is measured along the
line of the woman, sexuality (in the West) is the province of the
man. What did Freud mean by saying that there is only one libido
and it is a male one, if not that this was so for women as well as
men? Psychoanalytic (Freudian) theory is certainly phallocentric,
in that Western ideologies equate the male with sexuality and the
female with asexual motherhood.
Because psychoanalysis has followed culture into subordinat-
ing sexuality to reproduction, it has lost sight of its own revolution-
ary insight into the importance of sexuality; it has necessarily
moved from the understanding gained from grasping the psychic
symptom as a sexual manifestation to following the interplay of
fantasies. The clinical transference, which should represent the
impasses produced by fantasies (Lacan, 1982), can become the be-
all and end-all of therapeutic resolution and theoretical research, to
be or not to be married, to have or not to have a baby, the mark of
“the cure”. To restore sexuality to its central place would entail
resolving the symptom back into the unconscious representations
of the sexual drive that composes it; a large part of this sexual drive
is “perverse”.
To re-read The Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud, 1905d) is to be
confronted with a paradoxical sensation: the essays’ theses—in
particular the presence of infantile sexuality—have long been com-
pletely accepted, yet one is faced with what is still today a brief but
revolutionary volume. This is not only because what it argued in
1905 was path-breaking then, but because it still is today: the
argument has not now, nor ever in the past, collapsed back into
common sense or acceptable ideologies—despite apparently being
accepted, it is as radical as it ever was.
Octave Mannoni called The Three Essays “the book of the drive”
(Mannoni, 1968). It is in this book that we can find the lost sexuality
of psychoanalysis: a book that starts with the human being as
necessarily perverse and puts into question any idea of natural
and normal sexual desires, of “sexual difference” and reproduction.
The radical implications of the concept of “gender” within psy-
choanalysis should be heir to The Three Essays, for “gender” does not
imply the necessity of genitality nor of a fixed sexual object nor of
reproduction. Although gender is deployed in the construction of
difference, it is not structured around it. The difference between the
sexes to which gender necessarily refers lies outside its framework,
thus no explanation of hierarchy is called for—the term applies
indifferently to women as to men. Analogously to race, gender
produces its own differences; difference is not intrinsic to the
concept as it is to “sexual difference”. “Gender” is the polymor-
phously perverse child, grown up. Its morality comes from else-
where than the subjection of sexuality to reproduction. It comes
from the relationship between sexuality and violence in the strug-
gle for psychic survival which at a certain stage is interpreted as
dominance.
I suggest, then, that the morality of gender has to do not with
accepting sexual difference but with the resolution of violence,
being able to accept instead of murdering the other who is so like
one. This self-same other is both the same as the self in human
needs while simultaneously other than oneself—likeness in
unlikeness, unlikeness in likeness. In reproductive “sexual differ-
ence” relationships, the other object illusorily offers what the sub-
ject has not got; that is not the case with gender. “Gender” does not
revolve around what is constituted as “missing”—such as the
absent phallus—nor implicate its replacement such as its compen-
sation in the baby (the equation “baby = phallus”). The Three Essays
are on the perversions, infantile sexuality, and puberty. There
needs to be a fourth to complete the stress on non-reproductive
sexuality, a fourth that might have been quite as shocking as the
notion of infantile sexuality in its time: the sexuality of the post-
menopausal woman. [This was noted early: Helene Deutsch (1947)
74 JULIET MITCHELL
recorded with pleasure a response of Princess Metternich when

asked about sex in the elderly woman: “You will have to ask
someone else, I’m only sixty.” As with the “discovery” of infantile
sexuality, everybody except the experts has known about it all
along.]
Since the 1960s reproduction and sexuality have become un-
locked—Freud once remarked that whoever found the means of
achieving this would have accomplished something of untold ben-
efit to mankind. In the Western world there are now very few
countries that are replacing their populations through births; the
higher the economic success of the woman, the greater the chance
of “childfree-ness”. Where children are wanted, this can be so-
cially detached from heterosexuality, from reproductive age—
even, partially, from life. This is not quite so biologically, although
now reality is nearly in line with fantasy sex and the anus will be
able to house the embryo. It is not, I believe, that these social or
technological changes play out immediately into psychic life: it is,
rather, that there is something latent in psychic life that responds
to them, indeed that must have been part of their pre-condition—
because asexual reproduction is a prevalent fantasy with many
versions, in time it can be realized technologically. Judith Butler,
the promoter of “gender trouble”, asks questions that are pointing
not so much to something universally radical as to a potentiality of
a particular historical time in a very limited geographical place
(Butler, 1999):
Is the breakdown of gender binaries . . . so monstrous, so

frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible
and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender?
[p. viii]
[This] text asks, how do non-normative sexual practices call
into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis?
How do certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a
woman, what is a man? [p. xii]
For “non-normative” I believe we should substitute “non-repro-

ductive”. More fundamentally, I would argue that we can chal-
lenge “gender binaries”, as Butler suggests, precisely because
gender, unlike sexual difference, is not constructed as a binary.
A plurality of sexual relationships has been on the agenda since

the very onset of second-wave feminism in the 1960s; that was the
conclusion to my own first work in this field (Mitchell, 1966). I now
believe that the very notion of gender came into being as an
expression of this proposed pluralistic programme. However,
where we have hitherto looked for a relationship between social
change and the psyche along the lines of a very slow alteration in
the content of the ego, I would now argue for a much greater
interaction between the two spheres.1
At the end of the nineteenth century the patriarch was the most
visible social force—Freud’s theories of the mind implicated the
father. However, subterraneously the period saw the rise of the
overwhelming importance of the child and, with it, the mother. It
was not only that this social change eventually impacted, some two
decades later, on psychoanalytic theory with the so-called “moth-
ering of psychoanalysis” (Sayers, 1991), it was that the child and its
mother were always crucial aspects of psychic fantasy, which be-
came more dominant with changing social practices. These latent
psychic factors assisted the social change. So too with the recent use
of a recognition of siblings. The point is obvious—however, it is
difficult for any of us to perceive what has not yet emerged.
My argument is threefold, my third point being my greatest
concern: (1) that the shift from the deployment of the concept of
“sexual difference” to that of “gender” indicates a move from the
dominance of reproductive object-relations, oedipal and pre-oedi-
pal–maternal, to a gamut of “polymorphously perverse” sexual
arrangements; (2) that the previous dominance of reproduction
was, in part, responsible for the demise of the determinative role of
sexuality within psychoanalysis; and (3) that, although there is
always interaction, the perpetuation of the polymorphously per-
verse, non-reproductive sexuality takes place through lateral, not
vertical relationships, starting with siblings in the context always
of peers and later of affines. In other words, as the infant–maternal
was latent in the heyday of patriarchal psychoanalysis, so the
sibling/the lateral has been latent throughout the reproductive
(inevitably more matriarchal than patriarchal) period. The evi-
dence and suppression/repression of this can, I think, be noted in
work arising from the two world wars.
76 JULIET MITCHELL
What would/will this lateral gender sexuality look like? How

will it affect our theory? What follows are some suggestions for
clinical research into this question. The advent of a sibling (or
awareness of the older other who is so like the emergent infantile
subject) produces ecstasy along narcissistic lines and despair occa-
sioned by the sense of annihilation of being displaced/replaced or
just “not there”. The baby, no less than the parent, is entranced by
the child’s self-sufficient playfulness. But the other child, usually
the sibling, delights for its own reasons too. What are the psychic
mechanisms involved?
Instead of Oedipus Rex we will have Antigone: murderous broth-
ers, a sister, Antigone, who knows the meaning of death, and one,
Ismene, who does not. My suggestion of an “Antigone complex”
negotiates the life-and-death conflict of the “self and other”. It
implicates power, violence, love, and hate. Then instead of the
father’s “no” phallus for the mother of the castration complex (and
what earlier I have argued is the mother’s “no”, you cannot be
pregnant), we have a sister, Antigone, insisting that one must
acknowledge two brothers, not just one—even if they are different
from each other and at war, they are equal in death. Instead of the
hiatus of “latency” between Oedipus and puberty (dyphasic “sexu-
ality”), lateral sexuality is subject to the social/educational enforce-
ment of Antigone’s law: different but equal. Lateral desire does not
involve the symbolization that comes about through the absence of
the phallus (or womb): it involves seriality. As a part of a series,
girls and boys are “equilateral”—in other words, they are not
defined by what is missing. Girls and boys explore what is there,
not what is not.
There seems to be no use of an intrinsic difference here in the
way that marks the social construction of sexual difference for
reproduction. Gender sexuality can be realized in transgendering,
homosexuality, and heterosexuality. “Latency” has been noted to
be less marked than in earlier historical periods; this may well be
because the increasing role of the school in relation to the family
privileges lateral and peer relations over vertical child–parent
ones. The dominance of a lateral peer-group facilitates non-repro-
ductive sexual exploration of all kinds. But the violence that is the
response to the danger of “death” or the subject’s annihilation
marks the sexuality and may be what establishes the enforcement

of male supremacy. Sisters and brothers mark the nuclear point of
sameness and difference: is that your sister? “Closer than that” for
the transsexual or transgender but further than that for the affine
whom one might marry. At one end of laterality is a minimal
differentiation, at the other much greater separation when brothers
and sisters love, cherish and protect, kill, rape, or simply lose
touch. An “Antigone complex” is only one aspect of laterality—
Shakespeare’s comedies can provide a playground in which we
might search for the pleasures of sibling sameness and difference:
the joy of the child in the child.
NOTES
This chapter has been adapted from a chapter in J. Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and
Violence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003).
1. In a forthcoming study, Mauthner (2003), claims that sistering contrib-
utes to feminine psychology as much as mothering and daughtering. This
confirms my argument that the neglect of sibling relations underlies our
blindness to this social shift. On the greater interaction of the social and psyche,
see my own volume (Mitchell, 1984, Ch. 3); from the outset the neonate takes in
the social as well as its own bodily experiences.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Tenth Anniversary edition. London: Routledge.
Deutsch, H. (1947). The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpre-
tation. Vol. II: Motherhood. London: Research Books.
Green, A. (1995). Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76 (5): 871–883.
Lacan, J. (1982). Intervention on transference. In: J. Mitchell & J. Rose
(Eds.), Feminine Sexuality and the École Freudienne (pp. 61–73). Lon-
don: W. W. Norton.
Mannoni, O. (1968). Freud and the Unconscious. New York: Pantheon
Books.
78 JULIET MITCHELL
Mauthner, M. (2003). Sistering: Power and Change in Female Relation-

ships. London: Palgrave, Macmillan.
Mitchell, J. (1966). Women: The longest revolution. In: Women: The
Longest Revolution. Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanaly-
sis. London: Virago, 1984.
Mitchell, J. (1984). Women: The Longest Revolution. Essays on Feminism,
Literature and Psychoanalysis. London: Virago.
Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. London: Maurice Temple
Smith.
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy
of sex. In: J. W. Scott (Ed.), Feminism and History (pp. 105–151).
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Sayers, J. (1991). Mothering Psychoanalysis. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Scott, J. W. (1996). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. In:
J. W. Scott (Ed.), Feminism and History (pp. 152–180). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Stoller, R. (1968). Sex and Gender. London: Hogarth.
CHAPTER SIX
Gender and sexual difference
Colette Chiland
F
or a full discussion of Juliet Mitchell’s very stimulating
chapter (Chapter 5, this volume), several points would re-
quire further clarification and therefore deserve to be devel-
oped in much greater detail than is possible within the confines of
one chapter; I shall therefore have to put many of these to one side.
In reading her chapter, I found myself in complete agreement with
certain of her statements and in disagreement with some others. It
is not enough, of course, simply to say, “I do not agree”; we should
try to understand what gives rise to this kind of disagreement.
I am in complete agreement with Juliet Mitchell when she
stresses the importance of sexual difference. I myself lay a great
deal of emphasis on this in my book, Le Sexe mène le monde [Sex
makes the world go round] (Chiland, 1999), though I would not
define sexual difference only with reference to reproductive sexu-
ality, as she does. As far as I am concerned, gender has not replaced
sexual difference, nor does the “subject–subject construction” lie
within the area of gender and the sexual drive (therefore being
linked more to the relationship between siblings than to the par-
ent–child relationship).
79
80 COLETTE CHILAND
I have essentially five points that I discuss here:
1. the importance of the sexual difference;

2. the dissociation of sexuality from procreation;
3. gender;
4. gender and the sexual difference;
5. what we mean by “man” and by “woman”.
The importance of the sexual difference

The importance of sexual difference was dismissed by a some
feminists, in part because of the confusion that existed between
facts and rights. As regards facts, the recognition of the reality of a
particular difference between men and women is unavoidable; to
designate it, I use exactly the same phrase as does Juliet Mitchell:
sexual difference. But this fact does not and should not imply
inequality of rights between men and women; this is the point of
the—perfectly legitimate—struggle that feminist movements have
conducted. My impression, however, is that we have not thought
deeply enough about the reasons why, in different cultures and
over the centuries, women have allowed themselves to be debased
and oppressed—and still continue to do so in many places—and
why they have consented to their destiny, a destiny that is not a
direct consequence of anatomy or biology, but of the social inter-
pretation of these elements.
What, then, do we mean by sexual difference? Here, as I have
indicated, my own point of view diverges somewhat from Juliet
Mitchell’s. I would say that sexual difference involves not only the
role of each partner in procreation (the man impregnates, the
woman gives birth and provides milk), but also the “position” of
each of them in actual intercourse (the man penetrates, the woman
is penetrated); it involves also, even before intercourse and pro-
creation come into the picture, the experience of one’s body, the
psychosexual cycle of life. All of this has to do with the genitals, but
in a way that appears more complicated than at first glance—and
than what used to be the case in the past: we must, after all, have a
thought for the intersexed, transsexuals, and paraplegics, for ex-
GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 81
ample. It is not the actual performance of intercourse and subse-

quent fertility that characterizes a man or a woman, but the possi-
bility or potentiality of these—though it is true that some societies
do demand actual performance: an unmarried woman is not con-
sidered to be a “proper” woman, a sterile man or woman is not
considered to be a “proper” man or woman, a man without sons is
not considered to be a “proper” man, and so on. Though the sexual
difference is indeed based on bodily characteristics, it is always
“interpreted” by the society in which we live.
A woman’s experience of her body is obviously a little more
complicated than the fact of not having a penis. Many different
experiences have to be lived through and accepted, and there are
marked caesuras: the menarche, menses, defloration, pregnancy
and childbirth, and, finally, the menopause—the keynote sign in all
of these stages being blood: from when it first appears to the day
when it ceases to flow. Menstrual blood is tremendously important:
the female genitals are interpreted in terms of a wound (we have
only to look at the wall-paintings in prehistoric caves); menstrual
blood is seen as dirty and dangerous, yet at the same time powerful
because of its connection with fertility; women are ashamed and
feel guilty, and this leaves the way open to all kinds of submissive-
ness. “For indeed, a Baruya woman has merely to see blood start to
flow between her thighs for her to hold her tongue and mutely
consent to whatever economic, political, and psychological oppres-
sion she may be subjected” (Godelier, 1982, p. 353; 1986, p. 233).
There are no such occurrences in the sexual life of men; their
first ejaculations are not a particularly dramatic event. Conse-
quently, society creates rites of passage for men; these may at times
be cruel in the extreme, for men have to prove their strength; they
have to cut themselves off from the feminine world in which their
mothers brought them up as young boys and expel any trace of
femininity that they may still be carrying within.
The dissociation between sexuality and procreation

I have the feeling that it is the question of the dissociation between
sexuality and procreation that leads Juliet Mitchell to link, on the
one hand, sexual difference with procreation, the parents, and the
82 COLETTE CHILAND
Oedipus complex and, on the other, gender with the sexual drive
and the relationship with siblings.
In fact, among mammals, the dissociation between sexuality
and procreation is specific to human beings, given the disappear-
ance of oestrus (the period during which fertilization is possible) as
a prerequisite for copulation. That is one reason why some col-
leagues maintain that all human sexuality is perverse in nature:
pleasure replaces procreation as its aim.
Socially and psychologically, however, this dissociation raises
various problems. There is no natural expression of drives in
human beings; everything is regulated by society: human beings
“marchent à la représentation” [“function by representation”], wrote
Maurice Godelier. We are frightened by the sheer power of our
drives. It is for this reason that religion has had such an enormous
impact; in the Christian world, sexuality is suffused with guilt,
unless its primary aim happens to be procreation.
In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud (1905d)
affirmed the existence of infantile sexuality, which has no connec-
tion with procreation, and integrated perverse sexuality within the
wider domain of human sexuality. It is not only the brother–sister
relationship that has no connection with procreation, it is the whole
of infantile sexuality.
For Freud, children are polymorphously perverse, because their
erotogenic zones are not under the primacy of the genital zone and
the relationship with the object. But perverse children stricto sensu
do exist, even though Freud made no mention of them; I suggest as
an example a six-year-old boy who forced little girls to suck his
penis in the stairway of the apartment block where he lived. Ac-
cording to Freud, the perverse adult is fixated at or regresses to
infantile sexuality and can only reach orgasm by inflexible and
exclusive acts that have little to do with “normal” adult sexual
practice. I am using the term “normal” to designate the final stage
of sexual development: union of the genitals with the aim of pro-
creation.
Other authors have linked perversion with the seduction of a
son by his mother and his humiliation because of his impotency
(Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, throughout her works), or with the
humiliation of the boy as a male, with a consequent threat to his
gender identity (Robert Stoller, throughout his works).
The brother-and-sister relationship does not represent “the

atom of kinship” as defined by Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s atom of
kinship consists of a man, his wife, and their son—an “atom” that
combines kinship by descent and kinship by marriage. All of this
author’s descriptions focus on the male ego, perhaps because he
affirms that men exchange women and not the converse; all rules as
regards prohibited categories of marriage are described in terms of
a man’s choice of woman, never the other way around. I know of
only one author who defines a “family” atom as a man, his wife,
and their son and daughter, thus ensuring the reproduction of the
species and the relationship with the universe: Bernard Saladin
d’Anglure (1985), who studied the Inuit and the importance they
attach to the fact of having children of both sexes. This is linked to
the importance of the brother–sister pair in Inuit mythology
(p. 141).
Gender
Gender was introduced as a concept in 1955 by John Money—not
by Stoller, as is often claimed—when he wrote about “gender
roles” in his study of the intersexed (Money, Hampson, &
Hampson, 1955). Children have an ingrained feeling that they
belong to the sex in which they have been reared. For example,
mutatis mutandis, a child with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, XX
chromosomes, an oversized clitoris, ovaries, and womb will, in
fact, feel him- or herself to be a girl or a boy depending on his or her
assigned sex; a child without a penis or with a micropenis and XY
chromosomes will still feel him- or herself to be a boy or a girl,
depending on his or her assigned sex. The crucial factor is the
parents’ conviction as regards their infant’s sex, because they will
bring him or her up in accordance with these innermost feelings.
Traditionally, societies assigned sex on the basis of the appearance
of the external genitalia. The assignment proposed by Money was
based on the feasibility of plausible genitals; if I may say so—
though the precise reference escapes me—someone once wrote
something about a hole being easier to make than a pole. . . .
If the parents have reared their child in the firm belief that he or
she is a boy or, mutatis mutandis, a girl, that assigned sex is more
84 COLETTE CHILAND
important than biological givens. Where there is conflict between

biological data and psychological forces, the latter may well prove
stronger than the biological forces.
After “gender role” appeared “gender identity”, a term first
used by Evelyn Hooker, according to Money (1985); then came the
division between sex and gender due to Stoller, again according to
Money (1985). The concept of “core gender identity” was coined by
Stoller and that of “gender role identity” by Ovesey and Person
(1973).
Robert Stoller’s two volumes entitled Sex and Gender (1968,
1975) are well known. “Core gender identity” is the feeling of being
a male or a female (or a hermaphrodite, in rare cases), while
“gender identity” is the feeling of being masculine or feminine. Sex
is biological, gender is social and psychological. But, for Stoller,
gender is not entirely distinct from sex. Masculinity and femininity
are very difficult to define because they do not exist per se—they
are culture-dependent, interpretations of maleness and femaleness
(Stoller, 1980). Stoller’s study of transsexualism (a word coined by
Harry Benjamin in 1953) followed on from his study of the
intersexed.
Gender holds a tremendous attraction for sociologists and for
feminists, though they have gone beyond what was said by Money,
Stoller, and others, by claiming that gender is wholly a creation of
society. We may object that had the sexes not existed, society
would not have invented genders; in fact, it did not invent genders:
it gave arbitrary meanings to the sexes—it invented grammatical
gender, which is not strictly connected with sex and does not exist
in every language (Corbett, 1991).
Finally, sex itself came to be considered as an invention of
society, because all our thinking about sex is filtered through social
representations. Some go as far as to speak of “biological gender”,
though this nullifies the original sense of the term “gender”. I prefer
to speak, in addition to biological sex, of psychological sex, and
societal or social sex (birth certificates in France specify “sexe fém-
inin” or “sexe masculin”—that is, a reference to sex, not to gender),
and I support the struggle for sexual equality. It can be seen that,
instead of clarification, the idea of gender may generate confusion.
Many of those who use the notion of gender are involved in the
struggle against the dichotomy between the sexes as source of
discrimination; they are concerned also by issues such as the cat-

egorization of sexual orientation. I would surmise—without any
certainty, of course—that Juliet Mitchell would tend to see in the
sibling relationship, with its non-reproductive sexuality, the root of
sexual variations (i.e. any kind of sexuality that is not heterosexual-
ity). For me it is strange to think of the Oedipus complex as not
related to the sexual drive. In general, the child feels excluded from
the relationship between the parents, a relationship in which he or
she wants to occupy one and the other position. For Freud, bisexu-
ality, defined as involving both homosexual and heterosexual im-
pulses, was related to this complete form of the Oedipus complex.
For the person who refuses his or her gender, the way the parents
experience both their sexed identity (gender identity) and their
sexuality as a couple is important.
Gender and the sexual difference

I would argue that gender as such does not express any form of
sexuality, reproductive or not. It is an expression of “being”. I find
it important also to distinguish between “sexed”, which deals with
sex differences, and “sexual”, which deals with sexuality. In my
view there exists a sexed identity (gender identity), but it is prob-
lematic to affirm the existence of sexual identity, either hetero- or
homo- or bisexual.
Juliet Mitchell claims that the ego is always sexed, and is sexed
as regards sexuality. I would argue that the self is always sexed,
and sexed as regards narcissism. By “self” and “identity” I mean,
following Winnicott (1958, p. 248): “the individual human being’s
continuity of being”. A child’s sex is in the mind of his or her
parents before he or she becomes aware of it; later, children inter-
pret the experience they have of their body through the conscious
and unconscious messages communicated by their parents. This is
the register of narcissism and its development. Parents contribute
to the development of healthy or pathological narcissism.
I do not think, as Juliet Mitchell suggests, that gender is heir to
the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It is, rather, heir to cultural
anthropology, as expressed in Margaret Mead’s seminal work, Male
and Female: A Study of Sexes in a Changing World (1948). I wonder
86 COLETTE CHILAND
why that book is not referred to more often. Without employing the
word “gender”, Mead shows that every society has a concept of
how males and females should feel and behave and how, through
the educative and other child-raising procedures it sets up, it
shapes children in such a way that they become the men and
women that society expects. Every behaviour and psychological
feature has been labelled masculine in one culture and feminine in
another, with the exception of war and motherhood; but even in
these two cases, women have sometimes gone to war, and men have
practiced the “couvade”, an imitation of pregnancy and childbirth.
Freud did not pay much attention to social aspects—they were
merely conventional, he argued—nor to psychological traits, since
they were subject to individual variation. He made no distinction
between heredity and inheritance, believing that acquired charac-
ters were in fact inherited. Feminine and masculine were defined
by the characteristics of sexual cells and organs: the spermatozoid
is active, the ovule is motionless and passive. Little girls were boys
until puberty because they masturbated a masculine organ, the
clitoris, considered by Freud to be an abortive penis.
He was not helped by the fact that there is only one word in
German for sex and gender, Geschlecht, and one adjective for male
and masculine, männlich, just as for female and feminine, weiblich
(the task of the translator into English or French is difficult: the
concepts have to be interpreted, not simply translated). Also, the
notion of personal identity was not used by Freud.
I would not say that gender has replaced sexual difference.
Gender as a social construct was first distinguished from sex as a
biological given and now tends to replace sex, at least outside the
field of psychoanalysis; sex also is now seen as a social construct.
Within psychoanalysis, in object-relations theory, the search for the
object replaced pleasure-seeking; then drives and instincts disap-
peared in relational psychoanalysis. In another context, the simple
dichotomy between two sexes or two genders was called into
question: hence the introduction of a third sex/gender. Nowadays
the dichotomy between sex and gender is also being questioned
(Herdt, 1994):
Of course, there are conceptual dangers involved in breaking
precipitously with the past convention of distinguishing arbi-
trarily between sex (as biology and nature) and gender (as
culture and nurture). However, we aim in this volume to
renew the study of sexual and gender variation across time and
space, critically looking at the pitfalls of continuing to objectify
the dichotomy of sex and gender, which is probably culturally
bound and scientifically misleading. [p. 21]
And, finally, “transgenderism” attempts to suppress gender, the

dichotomy, and any categorization whatsoever.
Let us take transsexualism as an example of another way of
dealing with sexual difference. People may ask for hormonal and
surgical sex reassignment: some are transvestites, others prosti-
tutes, and so on. I will consider those whose main problem relates
to their identity. They acknowledge the fact of a sexual difference
and are ready to accept it . . . but “over the sex border”, as Georgina
Turtle (1963) said—that is, on condition that they be allowed to
belong to the other sex. They acknowledge the sex of their body,
but they claim that it is not “their” sex; their sex is that of their
mind and their soul. They want the surgeon to give them their
“true” body. This is a denial of reality, for it is impossible to obtain
the “true” body or the “true” genitalia of the other sex. Neverthe-
less, for these individuals, their neo-sex (by this I mean the recon-
structed genitals) is the proof of the truth of their discourse when
they say that they belong to the other sex.
They seem to have forgotten (sometimes they say they want to
forget) the split that is operating here as regards their childhood,
which they lived through as members of the abhorred sex. I have
not seen Monika Treut’s film. But, in my experience, no transsexual
reveals anything of him/herself in the initial sex, the one assigned
at birth (in this specific instance, female). Either they show photos
of themselves proving that they have always been a member of
their present sex, the target sex (in this case, a boy or man), or they
destroy the hated photos that show them as members of the sex to
which they refuse to belong. In the case of a female-to-male trans-
sexual, the young man would hardly describe himself as “closer
than a sister”; the female figure (himself as he was in the past) is
hated—it is as though she had never existed, as though she were a
complete stranger living in his body, as Domenico Di Ceglie and
David Freedman (1998) put it.
88 COLETTE CHILAND
The transsexual puts us in a very difficult position. Transsexu-

alism is still an enigma. It has been argued that the transsexual
suffers from having a female brain in a male body (or the converse,
as the case may be), because of the structure of a small nucleus
such as the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria
terminalis, around 2 mm3, the development of which may have
been influenced by prenatal hormones (the role of this structure is
known in the behaviour of rats, but not in that of human beings,
and of course we know nothing of the gender identity of rats).
So the transsexual is an intersexed person who ought not to feel
guilty for anything that has happened. If psychopathogenesis is
evoked, transsexuals experience it as an accusation; they are not at
all ready to explore what may be going on in their minds; what
they want is a change of body. If parents consult for their young
child who refuses his/her assigned identity without there being
any sign of an intersex condition, we see changes occurring as the
work we do with the child and his/her parents progresses. Thus
gender identity disorder may be the consequence of problems in
the parent–child relationship early on in life (only in rare cases is
there evidence of siblings playing a role in gender identity disor-
der). There should be no more guilt attached to early psychological
influences than to disharmony between the various biological
components of the body. Nevertheless, transsexuals tend to be
rejected, just as, in former times, the intersexed found themselves
rejected.
What do we mean by “man” and by “woman”

Once upon a time, I was satisfied with the following definitions: a
man is a male who, accepting himself as masculine and wanting to
be recognized as such, broadly conforms to the masculine stere-
otypes of the culture of which he is part; a woman is a female who,
accepting herself as feminine and wanting to be recognized as
such, broadly conforms to the stereotypes of the culture of which
she is part. I took for granted the fact that there were males and
females, without the idea of “betwixt and between” ever crossing
my mind; I wanted simply to emphasize that refusal of one’s
assigned sex was different from the wish to fight the social preju-
dices and inequalities of one’s culture.
But the problems of the intersexed (1.7 % of the population) are
such that we can no longer avoid the question: what do we mean
by “male” and “female”? In clear-cut cases there is no problem,
because every individual fits the criteria: chromosomes, gonads,
internal organs, appropriate hormone level, sensitivity to hor-
mones, genitals, secondary characteristics. But what about people
who feel themselves to be men (or women) without being able to
satisfy the requirements of the sexual difference? They feel them-
selves to be men without a penis, they cannot penetrate women,
and they are sterile. Or they feel themselves to be women with no
ovaries, womb, periods, fertility, or vagina—though, as Stoller
(1968, second ed., 1974, p. 51n) wrote: “If Freud had worked with a
woman without a vagina, I think he would have seen that the only
thing a woman wants more than a penis is a vagina. It is only when
a woman has normal genitalia that she can afford the luxury of
wishing she had a penis.”
To come back to transsexuals (who number anything from 1 out
of 30,000 to 1 out of 1,000,000 in the general population). Had they
remained within their initial sex, they could have led the perfectly
ordinary life of a man or a woman (as the case may be). Surgery can
give them the appearance of a changed body, but not the real body
of the other sex. They identify with the cultural values of their
target sex. Is it enough to be a man or a woman, a father or a mother
(adoption, insemination by donor)? I am simply raising the ques-
tion, with no pretence at having found the answer.
Certainly we need another kind of treatment—other, that is,
than hormonal and surgical sex reassignment. But “to change what
is in the mind”—which is what some patients hope for, since
complete physical change is impossible—is still to invent (Chiland,
1997a, 1997b, 2000). In the meantime, are they to be condemned to
live in a no man’s/no woman’s land? They are, after all, human
beings.
We are tossed about like some frail skiff in a storm, as we
oscillate between the desire for openness and the need, for the sake
of mental well-being—our own as well as that of other people—to
hold on to what I call in French “la boussole du sexe” [the “sex
90 COLETTE CHILAND
compass”]: in other words, acknowledgement and acceptance of

the sexual difference.
NOTE
Translation from the French revised by David Alcorn.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, H. (1953). Transvestism and transsexualism. International
Journal of Sexology, 7 (1): 12–14.
Chiland, C. (1997a). Changer de sexe. Paris, Odile Jacob. English edition:
Transsexualism: Illusion and Reality (trans. Philip Slotkin). London:
Continuum & Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Chiland, C. (Ed.) (1997b). Approche psychothérapique du transsexual-
isme. Perspectives Psy, 36 (4): 256–296; 36 (5): 388–397.
Chiland, C. (1999). Le sexe mène le monde. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Chiland, C. (2000). The psychoanalyst and the transsexual patient.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 81 (1): 21–35.
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Di Ceglie, D., & Freedman, D. (Eds.) (1998). A Stranger in My Own
Body. Atypical Gender Identity Development and Mental Health.
London: Karnac Books.
Godelier, M. (1982). La production des Grands Hommes. Pouvoir et domi-
nation masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guinée. Paris: Fayard.
English edition: The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and
Power among the New Guinea Baruya (trans. R. Swyer). Cambridge,
UK & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Herdt, G. (Ed.) (1994). Third Sex, Third Gender, Beyond Sexual Dimor-
phism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.
Mead, M. (1948). Male and Female: A Study of Sexes in a Changing World.
New York: William Morrow.
Money, J. (1985). The conceptual neutering of gender and the
criminalization of sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14 (3): 279–290.
Money, J., Hampson, J. G., & Hampson, J. L. (1955). Hermaphroditism:

Recommendations concerning assignment of sex, change of sex,
and psychologic management. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital,
97: 284–300.
Ovesey, L., & Person, E. (1973). Gender identity and sexual psychopa-
thology in men: A psychodynamic analysis of homosexuality,
transsexualism, and transvestism. Journal of the American Academy
of Psychoanalysis, 1 (1): 53–72.
Saladin d’Anglure, B. (1985). Du projet “PAR.AD.I” au sexe des anges:
Notes et débats autour d’un “troisième sexe”. Anthropologie et
Sociétés, 9 (3): 139–176.
Stoller, R. J. (1968). Sex and Gender, Vol. 1: The Development of Masculin-
ity and Femininity. New York: Science House; second edition, New
York: Jason Aronson, 1974.
Stoller, R. J. (1975). Sex and Gender, Vol. 2: The Transsexual Experiment.
London: Hogarth Press.
Stoller, R. J. (1980). Femininity. In: M. Kirkpatrick, Women in Context:
Women’s Sexual Development (pp. 127–145). New York: Plenum.
Turtle, G. (1963). Over the Sex Border: London: Gollancz.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma.
Collected Papers, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 243–
254). London: Tavistock.
CHAPTER SEVEN
From femininity to finitude:

Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again
Toril Moi
F
or a long time I used to think that feminists ought to choose
Lacan’s femininity theory over Freud’s. Although I consider
Freud the greater thinker, his eternal harping on penis envy
and motherhood as the solution to the “problem” of femininity
struck me as intellectually wrongheaded, and misogynist too. In a
passage that I particularly dislike, Freud claims that a woman of
about thirty
often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchange-
ability. . . . Her libido has taken up final positions and seems
incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths
open to further development; it is as though the whole process
had already run its course and remains thenceforward insus-
ceptible to influence—as though, indeed, the difficult develop-
ment to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the
person concerned. [Freud, 1933a, pp. 134–135]
These words are terrifying. Freud appears genuinely to believe that

at the age of thirty these women will never change.1 Their lives are
deprived of transcendence, Simone de Beauvoir would have said,
for she thought of the future as the horizon towards which all
93
94 TORIL MOI
human beings constantly reach. On this view, it is because the

future is open, because we live in time, that human existence is a
continuous becoming and not a fixed essence. This continuous
becoming only stops at death. Deprived of a future, these rigid,
unchanging women of thirty are the living dead, the Nosferatus of
the soul. No wonder Freud finds them frightening.
Compared to this, Lacan seemed positively upbeat. For him,
femininity is a position constructed in language, a position that can
be taken up by men as well as women. Here, I thought, there was
more of a promise of freedom for women. Moreover, I have always
felt particularly constricted by essentialist theories about women’s
nature: if the difference between Freud and Lacan was that Freud’s
femininity theory was essentialist whereas Lacan’s was construc-
tionist, I knew which one I preferred.
Over the years, however, I came to change my mind—not about
Freud’s theories about women, but about their relative merits
compared to those of Lacan. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom the concrete, living body is a
historically embedded situation, constantly created through inter-
actions with others and the world, I came to see that Freud’s
general theory about the relationship between the body and sexed
subjectivity (as opposed to his specific theory of women’s differ-
ence) was not so different from theirs, that he, too, thought of the
body as concrete, historical, and open to change. In such theories
the opposition between essence and construction does not apply.2
Lacan’s famous linguistic turn, on the other hand, transforms
the body into an abstract cipher, a purely idealist construct. Lacan
does not explicitly reject Freud’s theory about the way in which
psychosexual subjectivity is developed in relation to the person’s
sexed and gendered body. Lacan’s work still presupposes that
theory. Yet Lacan never really engages with this aspect of Freud’s
thought, and as he moves towards post-Saussurean linguistics, the
concrete, living body is increasingly left unmentioned. This is a
pity, for Freud’s understanding of the body and subjectivity is
promising material for feminists. (In my view, Beauvoir’s analysis
of how one becomes a woman draws on a very similar understand-
ing of the body.3) When Freud himself tries to theorize women,
however, the results are pitiful. He is, for example, mistaken about
penis envy, clitoral and vaginal pleasure, motherhood as a com-
FROM FEMININITY TO FINITUDE 95
pensation for penis envy, women’s general preference for sons

over daughters, the unchangeability of women of thirty, and about
much more too. (Is it really true, for example, that women have a
less punitive superego than men?4)
At the same time as I was reading Freud with Beauvoir and
Merleau-Ponty, I was also studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L.
Austin, and Stanley Cavell. Their understanding of language and
meaning made the post-Saussurean view of language that under-
pins Lacan’s theory appear flawed. I also came to feel increasingly
uneasy about the opposition between “construction” and “essence”
that had pushed me towards Lacan in the first place.5 Soon I
reached the point where I could no longer understand something
that had once seemed luminously clear: namely, exactly what it
means to say that something—femininity, for example—is “outside
language”, or “beyond the phallus”.
In this situation, the old feminist accusations against psy-
choanalysis returned to haunt me. Castration, in particular, has
always been particularly troublesome to feminists. Women are
castrated. Femininity is an effect of castration (often euphemisti-
cally renamed “lack”), woman is a void, a nothingness. Why would
women have anything to do with a theory that makes such claims?
Of course, the counterarguments instantly come to mind: don’t
worry, we are all castrated; femininity is nothing but a sliding
signifier that can attach itself to any body. Yes, of course. But
although we are all castrated, all marked by lack, women somehow
come across as more castrated than men, just as the signifier of
femininity gets attached to female bodies far more often than to
male ones. And why are women, but not men, exhorted to be,
remain, become feminine? If women fail to conform to the theo-
rist’s particular picture of femininity, why is this always presented
as a problem for women, but not for the theory?
In short: the old certainties were gone. It was time to return to
Freud and Lacan, yet again. This essay is the result of that reread-
ing. But why reread Freud and Lacan on femininity today? The
great majority of practicing analysts have long since abandoned
classical Freudian and Lacanian femininity theories and quite
rightly insist that they do not analyse women with such notions in
mind. Some analysts, not least in France, nevertheless remain in-
spired by Lacan’s understanding of sexual difference. And even
96 TORIL MOI
analysts who have no time for Lacan may be interested in seeing

what insights a new reading of some classic psychoanalytic texts
will yield. In contemporary cultural and literary theory the situa-
tion is different. In these fields Lacan’s concepts of castration and
femininity, as well as Lacanian ideas about what is or is not “out-
side language”, are still central, and every year all over the world
professors teach Lacan’s texts on femininity to new generations of
students.6
In this article I focus mostly on Lacan. But since Lacan’s theory
is based on a close reading of Freud, before turning to the relation-
ship between the penis and the phallus (yet again), I start by taking
a brief look at some aspects of Freud’s understanding of femininity
that are not so frequently discussed. I pay special attention to
Lacan’s post-Saussurean “linguistic turn”. I show that when the
phallus becomes a signifier, an already dubious theory of feminin-
ity as an effect of castration is wedded to a theory that postulates
the existence of a realm “outside language”, to which femininity
and its metaphysical ghost, jouissance, are relegated. An important
part of my argument is that Lacan’s post-Saussurean linguistics
encounters serious challenges from recent interpretations of
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Then I show that the
Lacanian concept of castration slides between three different defi-
nitions, in ways that make it both muddled and sexist. Finally, I
suggest that we can become clearer on what work the concept of
castration can and cannot do for us if we reconsider it in the light of
a different concept—namely, finitude. I take this concept from
Cavell but revise it in the light of work by women analysts such as
Joyce McDougall and Colette Chiland.
This essay is based on the assumption that psychoanalysis does
not need a theory of femininity at all. (Feminism does not need one
either, but there is no space for that discussion here.) Freud’s quest
for the “riddle of femininity” is never matched by a similar quest
for the “riddle of masculinity”. Both Freud and Lacan appear to
think that psychoanalytic theory can get along fine without a
theory of masculinity. In this way, femininity and sexual difference
come across as synonymous terms. Men become the norm, women
the problem to be explained; men embody humanity, women re-
main imprisoned in their feminine difference. Psychoanalysis does
not need such a theory of sexual difference. What it does need is a
new understanding of the wide range of different ways of becom-

ing a woman in the world.7
My critique of femininity theory does not presuppose a return
to any kind of “equality” theory.8 As Beauvoir herself was the first
to stress: to encounter the world in a female body is simply not the
same thing as to encounter it in a male body. We note, for example,
that when a man is described as feminine, whether by femininity
theorists or by anyone else, the meaning of the word is no longer
exactly the same as when a woman is described as feminine. We
need more historically specific, more situated, and far more clearly
defined accounts of women’s lived experience and women’s sub-
jectivity than femininity theories can produce.9 To reject femininity
theory, then, is not to reject the fact of sexual difference. It is to
reject theories that equate femininity and sexual difference, as if
women were the only bearers of sex. Femininity theories inevitably
and relentlessly turn women into the other.
A final introductory point: This is not an essay on the relation-
ship between feminism and psychoanalysis in general. To develop
the history and theory of that complex interaction would require a
book, not just one essay. I take for granted that psychoanalysis has
been and will remain an immensely useful theory for feminism.
Psychoanalysis has given us a whole series of concepts that are
invaluable to feminists and other cultural critics: the unconscious,
desire, fantasy, identification, projection, transference, counter-
transference, alienation, narcissism—the list could continue for a
long time. This essay is not about those concepts.10 The task I have
set myself here is simply this: to work out a critique of two major
psychoanalytic concepts—femininity and castration—through a
rereading of some fundamental texts by Freud and Lacan. I bring to
bear on these texts a perspective informed by Beauvoir and
Wittgenstein. As far as I know, this has not been done before.
Freud: the riddle of femininity

Freud recognized that he spoke about femininity in ways that did
not “always sound friendly” to women.11 The most obvious reason
for his churlishness is his failure to grasp the cultural and historical
specificity of his own insights. Freud writes as if the women in
98 TORIL MOI
analysis with him embodied eternal femininity. Yet any clear-

headed reading of his descriptions of women will find massive
evidence of the time-bound nature of his views.12 His remark about
the women of thirty is just one example.
Of course, Freud was unhappy about the sorry psychological
state of women of thirty. “As therapists we lament this state of
things”, he writes (Freud, 1933a, p. 135). Yet—and this is what I
find hard to forgive—he is as unable to envisage change as the
neurotic women he describes. Just as they horrify him by their
rigidity, Freud horrifies me. When he writes that the “difficult
development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities” of
these women, he is at once perceptive and blind. Yes, I want to say:
these women are paying the price for having to play the part of
“normal” women in a rigidly (hetero)sexist society. But it is their
situation, not the intrinsic demands of their reproductive and
sexual tasks, that has frozen their psyche.13 If Freud had acknowl-
edged that he was talking about socially oppressed women in a
historically specific situation, then he would surely have hesitated
to generalize about some mysterious entity called “femininity” that
necessarily exhausts women by the time they are out of their
twenties.
We need to distinguish between Freud’s general understanding
of psychosexual development and his theory of femininity. The
idea, for example, that children’s discovery of bodily sexual differ-
ences is crucial to their development of a sexed and gendered
identity does not have to lead straight to the claim that when a little
girl discovers that her brother has a penis, then she will instantly
feel inferior. Yet that is the claim that grounds the whole theory of
castration and lack for Freud. One can object to this particular story
without objecting to a more nuanced, historically and culturally
specific account of the many different psychosexual options avail-
able to little girls when they discover that there are at least two
sexes and that their own sex is only one of them. To reject this
particular story is not to reject psychoanalysis, for nondogmatic
psychoanalysts, whether feminist or not, have tried to develop a
better story ever since Freud first launched his.
Many feminists have tried to rescue Freud’s story by saying that
what girls discover is not the superiority of the penis, but the social
inferiority of their own sex.14 But even this presupposes too much
homogeneity in culture and among women, for some girls grow up

in families or in subcultures dominated by women. The discovery
of sexual difference and the discovery of sexism are not necessarily
simultaneous, and they certainly cannot always be summed up
under the heading of “lack” or “castration”.
A point that has not generally been noticed is that in so far as
Freud’s theory of femininity is based on a story of what all girls
must feel when they discover anatomical sexual difference, it actu-
ally runs counter to his own understanding of the nature of psycho-
analytic inquiry. This becomes clear if we look at the 1920 essay
“Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”. In this essay Freud tries to
find out why a specific young woman became a lesbian. Putting
together quite a plausible narrative, he stresses the girl’s strong
oedipal desire for her father, which suffered a bitter blow at the age
of 16 when the young woman’s mother gave birth to her third
brother. Freud then stresses that he would never claim that any girl
in the same situation was bound to become a lesbian:
So long as we trace the development from its final outcome
backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we
feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory
or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we
start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to
follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the
impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not
have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there
might have been another result, and that we might have been
just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The
synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other
words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have
foretold the nature of the result. [Freud, 1920a, p. 167]
To use metaphors occasionally used by Freud: the analyst is like a

detective or an archaeologist: piecing together the analytic evi-
dence, she is an expert at unravelling what has happened, not at
predicting what will happen. (This makes analysis more like liter-
ary criticism and less like the social and natural sciences than Freud
probably wanted to admit.) Insofar as femininity theory tells a
story about what is bound to happen when a little girl discovers that
she does not have a penis, it is a troubled attempt at “synthesis and
prediction”, with predictably flawed results.
100 TORIL MOI
To be fair, Freud openly admitted that his femininity theory

gave him trouble. Yet his most explicit admission of trouble does
not refer to castration (on the contrary, as we shall see, his last word
on the matter of femininity reaffirms the belief in castration as the
bedrock of femininity), but to an earlier idea, first formulated in
1905 in Three Essays on Sexuality, that femininity was passivity. In a
footnote added to the text in 1915, Freud writes: “‘Masculine’ and
‘feminine’ are used sometimes in the sense of activity and passiv-
ity, sometimes in a biological, and sometimes, again, in a sociologi-
cal sense. The first of these three meanings is the essential one and
the most serviceable in psychoanalysis” (Freud, 1905d, p. 219). The
obvious counterargument is that if Freud wants to speak of passiv-
ity, why can’t he just do so? Why does he need to claim that
femininity is synonymous with passivity, particularly when this has
the unfortunate side-effect of implying that all women are passive
and that no man is?
Freud saw the force of the objection, for in the same footnote he
writes: “Every individual . . . displays a mixture of the character-
traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a
combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last
character-traits tally with his biological ones” (Freud, 1905d, p.
220). (This concession inspired many theories concerning bisexual-
ity, a fact he later explicitly deplores, as we shall see.) But the
concession does not clarify the matter. Rather, confusion now sets
in. For if men and women do not display unmixed masculinity and
femininity, how can we tell what qualities “belong” to either sex? If
I see a bit of passive behaviour, how am I supposed to know that it
is feminine even if it occurs in a man? Isn’t the sex of the person in
question, after all, the bedrock on which Freud’s adjudications of
femininity or masculinity rest? Or, to put it differently: on what
grounds does Freud decide that the most fundamental meaning of
femininity is passivity? Why is this not simply an arbitrary meta-
phor determined not by scientific insight but by sexist ideology?
Despite his own misgivings, Freud nevertheless stuck to the
theory of femininity as passivity for almost 20 years. Perhaps it had
something to do with his steadfast conviction that women had to
give up “active” clitoral pleasure for “passive” vaginal pleasure if
they were to become fully feminine. However that may be, in the
1933 essay on femininity that contains the distressing passage on

women of thirty, Freud finally acknowledged the force of the
objection:
Even in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how
inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with
activity and feminine with passivity. . . . Women can display
great activity in various directions, men are not able to live in
company with their own kind unless they develop a large
amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these
facts go to prove precisely that both men and women are
bisexual in the psychological sense, I shall conclude that you
have decided in your own minds to make “active” coincide
with “masculine” and “passive” with “feminine”. But I advise
you against it. It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and
adds nothing to our knowledge. [Freud, 1933a, p. 115]
This is a strong indictment of his own previous theory. Yet Freud

does not conclude that he should give up defining femininity. It is
as if some picture of how things must be held Freud captive, forcing
him to produce an account of femininity that did not correspond to
the full range of his own analytic and theoretical insights.15 The
Freudian quest for femininity is fuelled by the idea that all women
simply must be psychologically different from all men. This differ-
ence is imagined to be something like an entity, a new element to
be uncovered, analysed, and described by intrepid discoverers. We
“must conclude”, Freud writes, “that what constitutes masculinity
or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot
lay hold of” (Freud, 1933a, p. 114). This “unknown characteristic” is
the mysterious “riddle of femininity” (p. 116), the Holy Grail of
psychoanalytic inquiry.16
But must we imagine femininity as a thing or a quality? Here I
have reached the same terrain as Stanley Cavell, who notes that we
have yet to determine “how it is that the question of sexual differ-
ence turns into a question of some property that men are said to
have that women lack, or perhaps vice versa—a development that
helps to keep us locked into a compulsive uncertainty about
whether we wish to affirm or to deny difference between men and
women” (Cavell, 1996, p. 98). Simone de Beauvoir registers the
same uncertainty as the experience of being offered an impossible
102 TORIL MOI
“choice” between being imprisoned in her sexed subjectivity or of

being forced to repress it entirely.17
Freud’s picture makes him believe that without a theory that
explains women’s difference, psychoanalysis is not complete. Yet
psychoanalysts have never set off on a quest for the key to the
“riddle of masculinity”. Freud’s male patients are studied as cases
of obsession, hysteria, sadism, or masochism, not as cases of more
or less stunted “masculinity”, and they are never said to be “femi-
nine” if, say, they choose not to have children. For Freud, to speak
of sexual difference is to speak of femininity, and vice versa. Men
are human beings, women are sexed; masculinity is universal,
femininity particular. In The Second Sex Beauvoir ironically sums
up the attitude: “Just as for the ancients there was an absolute
vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is
an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a
uterus: there we have specific circumstances that imprison her in
her subjectivity; one often says that she thinks with her glands”
(Beauvoir, 1953, p. xxi18).
The quest for femininity seriously damages the credibility of
psychoanalysis.19 Descartes thought that the pineal gland was the
site of the soul (or, to be specific, the place where the soul encoun-
ters the body). A century ago biologists were still trying to isolate
the “vital force” [élan vital]. Just as philosophy has long since given
up trying to pinpoint the soul, biologists have given up looking for
a single essence to explain all biological mechanisms. It is time to
give up the fantasy of finding the key to the “riddle of femininity”.
Women are not sphinxes. Or, rather: they are no more and no less
sphinxlike than men. There is no riddle to solve.
The phallus and the penis:

bodies, norms, and symbols in Lacan
Since Lacanian theory defines femininity as a specific relationship
to the phallus, no discussion of femininity in Lacan can afford to
overlook what he has to say about this contested symbol. The first
thing to note is that all who approach Lacan are ritually warned not
to confuse penis and phallus.20 Feminists are usually singled out as
particularly obtuse in this respect. Even the otherwise sensible
Joyce McDougall cannot resist a cheap shot: “[T]he word phallus is

often used indiscriminately in English to mean penis. Feminist
writers engaged in detecting and denouncing denigratory attitudes
towards women fulminate against the use of the word phallus. That
they equate penis and phallus suggests, paradoxically, a hidden
phallo-centric attitude on their part!” (McDougall, 1995, p. 6).
There appears to be a little psychoanalytic tradition here, for Freud
too enjoyed making jokes at the expense of feminists who persist in
asking for equal rights, as if they had not noticed the obvious
“morphological” differences between the sexes.21
The taboo on confusing phallus and penis stems from Lacan’s
own writing. In his famous 1958 essay “The Meaning of the Phal-
lus”, Lacan insists that anyone can take up the symbolic positions
labelled masculine and feminine: “[The clinical facts] go to show
that the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of
the anatomical difference between the sexes” (Lacan, 1958, p. 76).
The word “regardless” [sans égard à]22 is a strong one. It has usually
been taken to mean that anatomical configuration has absolutely
nothing to do with symbolic position, or, in other words, that the
relationship between phallus and body is arbitrary. This view has
been particularly appealing to feminists looking for an anti-essen-
tialist theory of sexual difference.
But is it true? Does this interpretation find support in Lacan’s
own text? And what about the more fundamental objection, which
anyone who has ever taught Lacan will recognize, for there is
always someone who asks: “Why does the phallus have to be called
phallus, if it has nothing to do with the penis?” A variation on this
question is: “Why does femininity have to be called femininity if it
has nothing to do with women?” Such questions deserve more
attention than they usually get, for both have to do with the
relationship between symbols and bodies, and the second also
raises the question of the relationship between symbolic function
and social norms or ideology.
What is one to reply? We can start by rereading “The Meaning
of the Phallus”, where it appears that Lacan, too, transgresses the
taboo on confusing the phallus with the penis: “[T]his test of the
desire of the Other is not decisive in the sense that the subject
learns from it whether or not he has a real phallus [un phallus réel],
but inasmuch as he learns that the mother does not”, he writes
104 TORIL MOI
(Lacan, 1958, p. 8323). There is, then, such a thing as a “real phallus”,
and the one thing we know about it is that mothers do not have it.24
The crucial explanation of why it is that the “phallus is the privi-
leged signifier” in the first place (Lacan, 1958, p. 82) is equally
revealing: “One might say that this signifier is chosen as what
stands out [le plus saillant] as most easily seized upon in the real of
sexual copulation, and also as the most symbolic in the literal
(typographical) sense of the term, since it is the equivalent in that
relation of the (logical) copula. One might also say that by virtue of
its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow [flux vital] as it is
transmitted [passe] in generation” (Lacan, 1958, p. 8225).
Lacan chose the phallus as the privileged signifier because it
juts out in sexual intercourse; because in that act it functions as a
copula (a verb of predication, a verb conferring being); because its
turgidity illustrates both the way in which semen is transferred in
intercourse and the way in which the generations succeed each
other. (The reference to generation, moreover, makes it obvious
that throughout this chapter Lacan is thinking only of heterosexu-
ality.)26
Now we can see that the question “why is the phallus called the
phallus if it has nothing to do with the penis?” is somewhat off the
mark. Lacan does not at all deny that the symbol of the phallus is
based on the image of the erect penis; on the contrary, he flaunts
the fact that it is. But so what? Lacan is simply inviting us to grasp
the difference between the phallus as a symbol, as a signifier, and
the penis as an ordinary part of male anatomy. Is this really too
much to ask? Let us grant the case. It is obvious that the word
phallus will conjure up images of penislike objects. It is also clear
that some human beings have a penis, and others do not. But once
the symbol has been defined in sophisticated, theoretical terms as
something nobody has, then it is absurd to reduce the symbolic
phallus back to the ordinary penis, supporters of Lacan might say.
This is a perfectly reasonable point. It is obvious that in
Lacanian theory the phallus soon comes to mean a lot more than
just the (erect) penis. To deny this would be obtuse. What feminists
object to is not, of course, the use of symbols, but the particular
symbol chosen to signify difference and lack, as well as the theory of
sexual difference that supports itself on the phallus/penis equa-
tion. However much we approve of symbolic uses of words for
body parts, we may still object that if the relationship between

anatomy and symbol is entirely arbitrary, then there really is no
reason to choose the phallus rather than the breast as the transcen-
dental signifier of difference.
Because the phallus represents the threat of castration, it pro-
duces sexual difference, the Lacanian theory goes. By taking up a
position in relation to the phallus, we become at one stroke sexed
and subjects. This is the entry into the symbolic order, into lan-
guage, the subjection to the Law, our fundamental subjection to
castration, to lack. (This sentence is based on the observation that
Lacanians usually treat “language”, “the Law”, and “the symbolic
order” in the same way. If this obscures some necessary distinc-
tions, I am looking forward to being corrected, for a serious ac-
count of the way in which Lacan and Lacanians actually use these
terms is much needed.) The phallus distributes humankind in two
sexes, but the sexes we are talking about are entirely symbolic,
entirely psychosexual. On this theory, however, women should not
take up a position as feminine more often than men. Yet—and this
is what generations of students are struck by—in “The Meaning of
the Phallus” Lacan clearly thinks that women will take up the
feminine and men the masculine position. What he means when he
says that the “relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regard-
less of anatomical difference”, is that there will always be exceptions
to the rule, not that there is no rule whatsoever.
Feminine subjects, Lacan writes, will struggle in vain to be the
phallus; masculine subjects will struggle in vain to have the phallus
(see Lacan, 1958, p. 84). As a result, both sexes end up acting in a
comedy, but femininity in particular is a masquerade, an endless
performance in which women try to mask the lack of the phallus.27
Here I just wrote “women”. Shouldn’t I say “feminine subjects?”—
not necessarily, for Lacan writes “women” too (or “the woman”, to
be exact):
Paradoxical as this formulation might seem, I would say that it
is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the
desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part
of her femininity [de la féminité], notably all its attributes
through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to
be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her
own desire in the body of the one [celui] to whom she addresses
106 TORIL MOI
her demand for love. Certainly we should not forget that the
organ actually invested with this signifying function takes on
the value of the fetish. [Lacan, 1958, p. 84]
If I understand Lacan correctly here, he is saying that because the
woman does not have a penis, she will perform a masquerade in
which she aims to be the phallus. He then says that this entails
rejecting an essential part of femininity [de la féminité]. But since
femininity is defined as the masquerade the woman performs, how
can that masquerade in itself be a rejection of an “essential part of
femininity”? The answer can be found if we consider that the word
femininity here is a translation of the French féminité.28 Depending
on the context, that word can mean “feminine”, “female”, “wom-
en’s” or “of women”. If we translate féminité here as “femaleness”,
the sentence makes perfect sense, since it now introduces a dif-
ference between the psychosexual féminité acted out in the mas-
querade and the anatomical féminité disavowed by the same
masquerade. What the woman rejects, then, is something specific
to women’s bodies or genitals—namely, the absence of a penis.
[This is exactly Freud’s point in “Analysis Terminable and Intermi-
nable” (Freud, 1937c), which Lacan invokes at the beginning of
“The Meaning of the Phallus” and to which I shall return.]
In this passage, Lacan speaks of women, not men. Women will
take up the feminine position; by fetishizing the male organ, women
will find the phallus they desire on the body of their male lover.
This appears to contradict Lacan’s claim that the “relation of the
subject to the phallus is set up regardless of anatomical difference
between the sexes”. Yet the only word that causes the contradiction
is “regardless”, which now appears as an overstatement. I am led
to conclude that Lacan’s theory cannot live up to that “regardless”,
for it seems to go as follows: The difference between the sexes turns
on their different relationship to the penis—one sex has it, the other
does not. This fact, then, structures the relationship of each sex to
the phallus. But anatomy is not the final arbiter of symbolic posi-
tion, for it is acknowledged that exceptions to the rule will occur.
Some men will take up a feminine position, just as some women
will take up a masculine position.
Lacan’s femininity theory, then, is based on normative expecta-
tions about the psychosexual position women will take up (as a
rule), and the one men will take up (as a rule). In most cases the
presence or absence of a penis determines the relationship to the

phallic signifier; to a very large extent anatomical sex does predict
one’s symbolic position. For Lacan, then, the relationship between
body and sexed subjectivity is neither necessary (that would be
biological determinism) nor arbitrary (that would be a form of
idealism, a denial of the material structure of the body), but contin-
gent. It is contingent and not necessary, because not all women will
take up a feminine position, just as not all men will take up a
masculine position, nor arbitrary, since there is a general expecta-
tion that women on the whole will take up a feminine position.
Structurally, then, Lacan’s femininity theory is exactly the same as
Freud’s.29
There is nothing sexist about this kind of theory about the
relationship between bodies and psychosexual identities. All it
means is that for Lacan, as for Freud and Beauvoir, one is not born
a woman but, rather, becomes a woman30: “Psycho-analysis does
not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could
scarcely perform”, Freud wrote in 1933, “but sets about enquiring
how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child
with a bisexual disposition” (Freud, 1933a, p. 116). Problems only
arise when normative expectations are coded into such theories;
this is where Beauvoir differs from Freud and Lacan, for Beauvoir
does not presume to define any kind of normative femininity,
whereas Freud and Lacan do.
Lacan’s understanding of the relationship between the body and
sexed subjectivity, then, is neither better nor worse than Freud’s: it
is the same. Feminists who choose Lacan over Freud because they
believe that Lacan’s theory is less essentialist are mistaken. Neither
Freud nor Lacan are essentialists. They both consider the relation-
ship between the body and the psyche to be contingent. The dif-
ference, as I have already stressed, is in their understanding of
the body. Freud always remained concerned with the concrete,
phenomenological body, whereas Lacan turns the body into an
entirely abstract and idealist concept.
Different critics have reacted differently to the connection be-
tween phallus and penis (I mean those critics who, like me, admit
that there is one). Jane Gallop’s brilliant analysis of the intricate
relationship between penis and phallus ends with a plea for con-
fusion, perceived as a way to connect the body with history: “To
108 TORIL MOI
read for and affirm confusion, contradiction is to insist on the

thinking in the body in history. Those confusions mark the sites
where thinking is literally knotted to the subject’s historical and
material place” (Gallop, 1988, p. 132). Inspired by Gallop, Charles
Bernheimer recommends that we insist on the “phallus’s penile
reference” since this would force psychoanalytic theory to account
for historical specificity and bodily materiality (Bernheimer, 1995,
p. 323). Lacan’s elevation of the phallus to universal signifying
status, Bernheimer writes, amounts to the “body’s strangulation by
the signifying chain and the consequent elimination of such mate-
rial factors as history, race and power from the theorization of
subjectivities” (p. 337). I have much sympathy for Gallop’s and
Bernheimer’s general wish to reconnect the Lacanian body with
history, but in my view Lacan’s concept of the body is so abstract
that it can never be successfully historicized.31
Lacan’s theory of sexual difference also strikes me as worse
than Freud’s.32 While both Freud and Lacan make their stories of
femininity turn on castration and lack, only Lacan gives the penis/
phallus a linguistic turn. For Lacan, the phallus is not just a symbol,
it is a signifier, and not just any signifier, but the transcendental
signifier, by which he means that the phallus is the signifier of
signification, the very signifier that enables meaning to arise in the
first place. Because the phallus is at once the signifier of sexual
difference and of meaning, Lacan’s system is one in which feminin-
ity (a position that, as we have seen, Lacan expects most women to
take up) can only ever be marginal to the symbolic. By definition, a
woman’s symbolic activities will always be called phallic. (Any
symbolic activity is phallic.) A woman who does not conform to the
Lacanian idea of femininity will be called masculine, just as a
deviant man will be called feminine. There is powerful social
normativity embedded in such language, a social normativity that
became only too apparent in the French debates in the 1990s over
parité (equal political representation for women) and pacs (pacts of
civil solidarity for gay, lesbian, and heterosexual couples), in which
many Lacan-inspired analysts took extremely reactionary posi-
tions.33
From a feminist and historicizing point of view, Lacan’s intro-
duction of post-Saussurean linguistics into psychoanalysis was a
mistake. Precisely because the relationship of femininity to the
phallus is a purely symbolic equation for Lacan, patriarchy can

never disappear. Lacan’s theory of sexual difference is a watertight
system, one that will always impose its own normative language of
sexual difference on whatever people actually do. The historical
content of the structure will change, but the structure itself will
remain forever intact.34 I may find that sixteenth-century notions of
what counts as “feminine” are vastly different from our own, but
the grid that produces the notion of “the feminine” in the first place
remains unchanged. What I am objecting to, then, is that Lacanian
theory is structured so as to formally require the “gendering” or
“sexing” of a vast array of human activities. Lacanian theory is a
printing machine for gender labels. It is incumbent on those who
believe that this is an excellent thing for feminism and for psy-
choanalysis to justify their belief.
Jouissance, femininity, and the “outside of language”

So far, I have only discussed Lacan’s femininity theory as it
emerged in the late 1950s, when it was characterized by two things:
its close reading of Freud and its introduction of post-Saussurean
linguistics (“the phallus is a signifier”). Fifteen years later, in the
seminar on femininity entitled Encore (1972–73), Lacan takes the
logic of his commitment to a post-Saussurean theory of language
far beyond Freud (Lacan, 1998).35 In the 1958 “Phallus” essay femi-
ninity is still fundamentally a matter of castration and the attempt
to mask that castration. In both texts the phallus is the transcenden-
tal signifier. But Encore casts femininity as inextricably linked with
jouissance, understood as an experience or state beyond significa-
tion, “beyond the phallus”. (For the purposes of this chapter I take
“beyond the phallus”, “beyond language”, and “beyond significa-
tion” to be fairly equivalent expressions.)36
But what exactly is jouissance? We have all heard that jouissance
cannot be translated (I have certainly said so myself).37 English-
language texts have usually left jouissance in French. The result is
that the concept comes to look particularly esoteric and mysterious.
From a purely linguistic point of view, however, it is difficult to
understand how a word like jouissance has gained this reputation.
When I compared the entry for jouir in Le Petit Robert to the entry
110 TORIL MOI
for “enjoy” in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, I found

that both verbs can mean to take pleasure, to enjoy, to possess,
to have the use of. Many of the examples in the two dictionaries
are exactly the same (to enjoy a view, to enjoy good health). The
major difference is that enjoyment no longer means orgasm in
everyday English (although once it did), whereas that’s exactly
what jouissance means in everyday French. To any experienced
translator, this is hardly an insuperable challenge. Readily avail-
able translations abound: “enjoyment”, “pleasure”, “orgasm”, and
“orgasmic enjoyment” all have something going for them. Any
remaining difficulties could be explained in a footnote, if it was
felt to be necessary. All translation involves betrayal, no doubt, but
when it comes to treachery, jouissance cannot be compared to
Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, Derrida’s différance, and Hegel’s Auf-
hebung. So why has it gained a reputation for being so particularly
difficult to convey in English?38
It may be not the word itself but what Lacan wants to do with it
that makes jouissance seem untranslatable. Any conscientious
translator would feel awkward writing sentences proclaiming that
women’s “enjoyment” or “orgasm” is “beyond the phallus”, some-
thing that cannot be spoken, and so on. Surely this cannot be all
Lacan means by jouissance, she would think; he must have some
kind of extraordinary phenomenon in mind, something that no
ordinary English word could possibly convey. Better, then, to leave
the word in French, so as to allow it to benefit from the mystery of
the exotic and the unknown. My point is that any word said to
denote something “beyond the phallus” would quickly come to
seem untranslatable.
There is no doubt that the enjoyment in question is ascribed to
women. If we were in doubt, the picture of Bernini’s St. Teresa on
the front cover of the French edition of the twentieth seminar
confirms the point. In Encore, Lacan writes of a “jouissance of the
body which is . . . beyond the phallus” (Lacan, 1972–73, p. 145). He
also states that “There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she
herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it—that
much she does know. She knows it of course when it happens. It
does not happen to all of them” (p. 145).
Female/feminine jouissance is beyond the phallus, outside lan-
guage, and therefore potentially threatening to the cohesion of the
symbolic/social order. But what, exactly, it is that escapes lan-

guage and other social structures here? Are we being invited to
believe that female orgasms, splendid as they are, belong to some
mystic, extralinguistic, yet revolutionary realm to which male or-
gasms provide no access? And why is jouissance accorded this
extraordinary status in the first place? Are female orgasms more
extralinguistic than any other human experience? It would seem to
be at least as difficult to capture in words the smell of a rose or the
exact nuance of an experience of shame as it is to describe an
orgasm. If one objects that “orgasm” is too pedestrian a word for
jouissance, we have to ask what Lacan means when he says that “we
designate this jouissance, vaginal” (Lacan, 1972–73, p. 146). It would
seem that he still clings to the old myth about the difference
between vaginal (truly feminine) and clitoral (masculinized) or-
gasm. In short: what does such a concept of femininity tell us about
women? Femininity here becomes a full-blown metaphysical con-
cept, rightly linked by Lacan to mysticism.39
Femininity and jouissance are imagined to be “outside lan-
guage”, “beyond the phallus”. (This they have in common with a
whole cluster of Lacan-inspired concepts that have enjoyed quite a
vogue over the past twenty or thirty years, namely the “unspeak-
able”, the “real”, “the beyond”, “trauma”, “psychosis”, and so on.)
There is a specific picture of language and meaning at work in such
concepts. First of all, we are encouraged to imagine language as a
kind of spatial territory, which can have an outside and an inside.
This spatial imagery underpins the Lacanian theory of language
and so comes to seem compulsory. But there are alternatives. We
could, for example, think of language as a human practice that
changes over time.
As soon as it has been established, the picture of the outside and
inside of language (of the symbolic, of signification, etc.) gives rise
to an urge to deconstruct the inside/outside opposition. This urge
is the effect of the spatial picture of language. If that picture loses its
hold on us, then the deconstruction comes to seem less urgent. The
belief in the beyond of discourse as well as the further belief that
entities beyond discourse are always struggling and straining to
disrupt it, always threatening to make our language nonsensical or
meaningless, leads to an obsession with boundaries, borderlines,
and limits, which will be proclaimed as the place where “represen-
112 TORIL MOI
tation” or “intelligibility” breaks down, where meaninglessness

and chaos begin.40
But something else also emerges in this picture, namely the
extent to which Lacanians and other post-Saussurean theorists
imagine that “language” means “representation”. For if we ask
how the spatial picture of language gets going, the answer seems to
be that it arises when we think of language primarily as consisting
in nouns. In post-Saussurean linguistics, nouns are always used as
examples of language. Just think of all those primers in post-
structuralism that first print tree for the signifier, then “tree” to
illustrate the signified, and finally a drawing of a tree to explain
what the referent is. That this is a horribly impoverished notion of
what language is, is Wittgenstein’s starting point for the whole of
Philosophical Investigations. In §1, he first quotes Augustine’s ac-
count of how he learned to speak (by hearing adults say words and
then point to the things represented by the words) and then goes
on to comment:
These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the
essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in
language name objects—sentences are combinations of such
names.—In this picture of language we find the roots of the
following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is
correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word
stands.
Augustine does not speak of there being any difference
between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of lan-
guage in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of
nouns like “table”, “chair”, “bread”, and of people’s names,
and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and prop-
erties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that
will take care of itself. [Wittgenstein, 1953, §1]
The point, then, is not that Lacan and other post-Saussureans are
wholly wrong. By definition, the referent of a noun is “outside
language”. A tree is neither an acoustic pattern or black mark on a
page, nor just a concept in our mind. In the language game called
“representation”, it makes sense to distinguish between an inside
and an outside of language. But “representation” is only one of the
games we can play with language. In §25, Wittgenstein himself
mentions “commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting” as

things we do with language. Think also of crying for help, praying,
confessing, bargaining, promising, predicting, thanking—the list
is, if not endless, at least very long. The point is, simply, that a
theory of representation is not a theory of language. As Wittgenstein
says, such a theory thinks primarily of nouns and a few other
nounlike categories and leaves all the “remaining kinds of word as
something that will take care of itself”. In short: what would we
draw to illustrate the working of words such as “help!”, “albeit”, or
“haphazardly”? I do not imagine that this is a full-scale philosophi-
cal analysis of the question. My point is simply this: the Lacanian
picture of language can no longer be taken for granted. Its very
foundations require justification and defence.
But even within the terms of a theory of representation it is
difficult to follow Lacan’s mysticism about jouissance. If all refer-
ents are outside language, why would the jouissance of women be
radically different from other nouns of sensation, such as the scent
of a rose, the taste of a soup, the exact colour of a car? I get the
impression that in Encore Lacan is overcome by the idea that
women’s experience of orgasm is beyond the reach of his knowl-
edge. But if this is so, then Lacan’s quest for the unreachable
jouissance of the woman is a version of scepticism. Again I find that
I have reached the same ground as Cavell, who notes that in Encore
Lacan “is casting his view of women as a creed or credo (“I
believe”), as an article of faith in the existence and the difference of
the woman’s satisfaction” (Cavell, 1996, p. 102). This, Cavell adds,
means that Lacan is “letting the brunt of conviction in existence, the
desire of the sceptical state, be represented by the question of the
woman’s orgasm. . . . So sceptical grief would be represented for
the man not directly by the question “Were her children caused by
me?” but by the double question “Is her satisfaction real, and is it
caused by me?” (pp. 102–103).
On Cavell’s reading, the question of the woman’s jouissance is a
question that arises specifically for men. His own highly pertinent
examples are Othello’s jealousy of Desdemona and Leontes’s fero-
cious suspicion of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.41 Read in this
way, Encore tells us something about the way scepticism can be
gendered. It can tell us why some men find women deeply enig-
114 TORIL MOI
matic. It also throws light on Freud’s conviction that femininity is

a riddle, whereas masculinity is not. But this way of taking Encore
also tells us that insofar as Lacan tries to turn his own perception of
women’s secret enjoyment into a general, universally valid theory
of sexual difference (and he does: Encore is the text that contains all
those algebraic formulas for sexual difference), he is universalizing
his own gendered experience.
Let me turn now to one other aspect of the claim that feminine
jouissance is beyond the phallus. According to Lacanian theory,
there is no meaning outside language, since meaning is an effect of
the chain of signifiers in the symbolic order ruled by the phallic
signifier. Nevertheless the entities beyond the phallus are said to
threaten to return to break up, subvert, or undermine the precari-
ous stability of symbolic signification. We are, then, asked to be-
lieve that in the outer darkness beyond representation dwell the
shadows of potentially meaningful entities: jouissance, femininity,
and so forth. That they are there is proved by the fact that they
exert pressure on ordinary, organized symbolic language, some-
times breaking it down entirely.
Given such a picture of femininity and the inside and outside of
language, it may seem logical enough to argue, as Luce Irigaray
once did, that women cannot express themselves in ordinary lan-
guage but must instead utter “contradictory words, somewhat
mad from the standpoint of reason” (Irigaray, 1977, p. 29). There is
a strong implication that the “language of reason” is to be imagined
as male or masculine. In everyday life, however, there is no evi-
dence that women actually are more contradictory than men. But
this has no impact on theories of this kind, for femininity has now
become a full-blown metaphysical concept.
There is another unformulated philosophical assumption here,
one that James Conant succinctly defines (in a different context) as
the “doctrine that there are certain aspects of reality that cannot be
expressed in language but can nonetheless be conveyed through
certain sorts of employment of language” (Conant, 2000, p. 178).
Cora Diamond puts the same assumption in slightly different
terms: “[T]here are some sentences which are nonsense but which
would say something true if what they are an attempt to say could
be said. The unsayability of what they attempt to say precludes its
being said, but we can nevertheless grasp what they attempt to
say” (Diamond, 2000, p. 158).42 Irigaray’s “contradictory words,

somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason”, fit precisely into
this category. The idea is that such language, “mad from the
standpoint of reason”, tells us something about the nature of femi-
ninity, something that evaporates or disappears as soon as we try
to rephrase it in the “language of reason”.
But it is not self-evident that it makes sense to speak of mean-
ingful yet incomprehensible language in this way. If we postulate
the existence of a kind of “mad language” in addition to the usual
“rational language”, we seem to end up with a version of the logic
Wittgenstein refuses to recognize in the preface to the Tractatus:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot
talk about we must pass over in silence.
Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or
rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in
order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to
find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be
able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be
drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply
be nonsense [einfach Unsinn]. [Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 3]
If I understand this difficult passage correctly, Wittgenstein is
saying that we can draw no limit to thought, for if we did, we
should have to be able to think on both sides of the limit. But then
the limit thought up by us would not be a limit; all such attempts
are self-defeating. In other words: anything we can think is by
definition thinkable. From this point of view, the post-structuralist
attempt to “think the unthinkable” is meaningless.43 The limit in
question, then, is not a limit in thought but a limit in language (“the
expression of thoughts”). Wittgenstein, however, has in mind not a
limit between language and some quasi-meaningful realm beyond
language, but one between language that makes sense and lan-
guage that does not. The passage denies that language that fails to
make sense in the ordinary way actually still makes (extraordinary,
hidden, metaphysical, profound) sense. Either language is mean-
ingful or it is not. We do not have to read this as a defence of a
rationalistic ideal of lucidity and transparency of meaning.44 It does
not follow that Wittgenstein believes that it is always easy to find
the sense of an utterance. Difficult language, language that requires
116 TORIL MOI
us to use all the procedures available to human beings looking for

the meaning of words, is not meaningless. In other words: “to make
sense in the ordinary way” is not a subcategory of sense-making.
On Wittgenstein’s logic, Irigaray’s subcategory of language that
sounds “mad from the standpoint of reason” loses its metaphysical
status and becomes just one form of language use among others.
Then it becomes open to analysis, not “from the standpoint of
reason” but from the standpoint of the ordinary procedures we use
to make sense of words.45 It is quite possible that in some cultures
women are trained to listen for certain kinds of sense that men are
not trained to listen for. But this would be a fact about some women
and some men in a certain place and time, not about femininity and
reason as such. There would, in particular, be no assumption that
the women’s strategies for interpreting certain utterances would be
more “mad from the standpoint of reason” than the men’s. The
advantage of this approach is that it avoids the reification of sexual
difference and returns us from metaphysics to the ordinary. Cavell
makes a similar point about the tendency to postulate sexually
different knowledge in men and women—a tendency that we find
in Encore:
The reification, let me put it, of sexual difference is registered,
in the case of knowledge, by finding the question of a differ-
ence in masculine and feminine knowing and then by turning
it into a question of some fixed way women know that men do
not know, and vice versa. Since in ordinary, nonmetaphysical
exchanges we do not conceive there to be some fact one gender
knows that the other does not know, any more than we con-
ceive there to be some fact the skeptic knows that the ordinary
human being does not know, the metaphysical exchanges con-
cerning their differences are apt to veer toward irony, a sense
of incessant false position, as if one cannot know what differ-
ence a world of difference makes. [Cavell, 1996, p. 99]
If we come to doubt the post-Saussurean picture of language, some

crucial concepts in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory no longer sound
so compelling. (Clearly, the critique does not affect the less “linguis-
tic” areas of Lacan’s thought, particularly the theories concerning
alienation, the mirror stage, transference and countertransference,
and the subject presumed to know.) The post-Saussurean view of
language shared by Lacan has been normal science, institutional-

ized doxa, in departments of language, literature, and cultural
studies for thirty years now. To speak of “normal science” and
“doxa” is to speak of principles and assumptions that have come to
be taken for granted. I think it is time for a reconsideration of the
linguistic foundations of post-structuralist theory. A serious en-
counter between post-structuralism and the so-called “new”
Wittgensteinians would do much to clarify the philosophical
premises of post-Saussurean (Lacanian and non-Lacanian)
thought.46
Muddling the meaning of castration

So far, then, I have claimed that it is useless to set off in quest for a
general psychoanalytic theory of femininity and that it is sexist to
assume that femininity and sexual difference are synonyms. I have
claimed that the phallus is not unrelated to the penis and that it is
not true that the relationship between psychosexual subjectivity
and bodies is arbitrary in Lacanian theory. I have also claimed that
the concept of jouissance is sexist, metaphysical, and bound up with
a theory of language that there are serious grounds to doubt. Now,
finally, I shall look at the ways in which Lacan’s concept of castra-
tion drifts between different meanings in ways that are “not always
friendly to women”, to echo an expression of Freud’s.
The concept of castration got off to a bad start. Both Lacan and
Freud define it in a way that makes it synonymous both with
femininity and with sexual difference. This makes castration
complicit with the “othering” of women denounced by Beauvoir.
That this is so becomes clear if we turn yet again to Lacan’s 1958
essay on “The Meaning of the Phallus”, which begins with a discus-
sion of castration, namely with a reference to Freud’s 1937 essay,
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”.47 This is where Freud
tries to explain why psychoanalytic treatment always fails to per-
suade a woman to give up her wish for a penis, and why it also fails
to persuade a man that “a passive attitude to men does not always
signify castration” (Freud, 1937c, p. 252). In women, Freud calls this
syndrome penis envy, and in men he labels it masculine protest: “We
118 TORIL MOI
often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the
masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychologi-
cal strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are
at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the
biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock.
The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological
fact, a part of the great riddle of sex” (p. 252). At this point, a
footnote informs us that: “In other words, the ‘masculine protest’ is
in fact nothing else than castration anxiety” (pp. 252–253). In both
sexes, then, castration is violently opposed. The difference is that
men fear castration, whereas women realize to their dismay that it
has already happened. Repudiation of femininity is repudiation of
castration, and this is a biologically based attitude in both sexes.
This interpretation will be controversial to some. Surely I have
not properly understood what castration means for Lacan. Castra-
tion, or the lack it opens up, is the entrance ticket to the symbolic
order for everyone, a Lacanian would say. What is at stake here is
the phallus, not the penis. In an attempt to explicate this doctrine,
Juliet Mitchell once wrote: “But because human subjectivity cannot
ultimately exist outside a division into one of the two sexes, then it
is castration that finally comes to symbolize this split. The feminine
comes to stand over the point of disappearance, the loss” (Mitchell,
1986, p. 393). This admirably concise formulation claims that all
human beings are marked by lack. To have to belong to only one
sex is a traumatic loss, for both sexes.
So far, so good. But why is it the feminine that comes to stand
over the point of sexual division? This only makes sense if we
assume that the feminine means that which is castrated. But how
do we get that idea? Why is that which is castrated defined as
feminine? Why not call it masculine, just to drive the point home,
particularly if we are speaking of a position that has nothing to do
with anatomical attributes, as so many Lacanians claim? The an-
swer can only be that the feminine is called the feminine and
described as castrated because, well, because women do not have a
penis. (The relationship between body and subjectivity is not arbi-
trary, it is contingent.)
On this theory, women are doubly castrated: first by having to
be only one sex (they are marked by sexual finitude, like everyone
else—see below), and second, by having to be the sex that does not
have a penis. Lacanian terminology thus creates the following set

of distinctions between symbol (left-hand side) and social phenom-
enon (right-hand side):
phallus | penis
femininity | women
castration | castration
We are sternly admonished to keep the two sides apart, to under-

stand that anyone can be feminine, that nobody actually has the
phallus, and so on. In this list, however, castration must show up
on both sides: this is where the cohesion of the symbolic and the
social, the psychic, and the anatomical surfaces.
The human and ideological effects of conflating castration with
femininity are distressing. Moreover, the conflation could be
avoided. For what Freud describes as the “repudiation of feminin-
ity” in both sexes is the human reluctance to accept the reality
principle, to give up the dream of being all, of living forever, of
narcissistic omnipotence, of living in a world that never frustrates
our desires. Why not call this a reluctance to accept our human
condition? But what exactly has this got to do with femininity, let
alone with women? Freud’s own text shows that to call this general
repudiation of lack “femininity” or “castration” is to place women
in an impossible position:
[T]he female’s wish for a penis . . . is the source of outbreaks of

severe depression in her, owing to an internal conviction that
the analysis will be of no use and that nothing can be done to
help her. And we can only agree that she is right, when we
learn that her strongest motive in coming for treatment was the
hope that, after all, she might still obtain a male organ, the lack
of which was so painful to her. [Freud, 1937c, p. 252]
Given his conviction that to be a woman is to be castrated, Freud

can only conclude that his depressed female patients are right to
mourn the penis they will never have. For women who strive in
vain to accept their so-called femininity, Freud counsels despair; to
women who try to claw their way out of depression by doing
something productive in the world, all he has to say is that they are
phallic and suffer from penis envy. Lacan’s theory does not lead to
120 TORIL MOI
different conclusions. The problem, then, is that the very language

of castration and femininity imprisons women in their sexual dif-
ference and blocks their access to general existential categories.
If both men and women fear “castration”, and castration turns
out to mean “femininity”, women cannot win. We need to find
better and less sexist language for experiences shared by men and
women. In one discussion of “Analysis Terminable and Intermina-
ble”, Cavell translates Freud’s castration into “victimization”. This
is a good example of how to avoid unnecessary gendering of
general terms (Cavell, 1996, p. 111).
In Freudian and Lacanian theory “castration” is used in three
different senses, namely: (1) to signify lack as a general human
condition; (2) to signify sexual difference or femininity; and (3) to
signify the discovery of our own “one-sexedness”, that is to say, the
discovery that we can only ever be one sex, in the sense that we can
only ever have one body. (Desire remains as polymorphous and
infinite as it ever was, but it is now confronted with the traumatic
discovery of sexual finitude. I shall return to this.) Meaning 1
encourages us to believe that as soon as something can be called
“lack”, it can also be theorized as castration. It is difficult to under-
stand why this is considered a sign of theoretical sophistication.
Meaning 2 is the clearly sexist theory of femininity with which this
chapter has been concerned. Meaning 3, however, is just fine, but
probably not very successfully conveyed by the word castration.
The indiscriminate use of castration encourages us to roam
freely between the three meanings, collapsing them into each other
as we please. The resulting confusion of categories is responsible
for a distinctly (hetero)sexist “oversexualizing” or “overgender-
ing” of human existence. It also has a tendency to generate a lot of
empty language. Imagine a cultural theorist who observes some-
thing that resembles a cut (a blank screen? a black screen? a sudden
hiatus? a pause?) and starts the theory machine. A cut evokes
castration, which evokes lack, which conjures up the woman’s sex,
and from there we go to nothing, death, the real, the beyond,
psychosis, madness—nothing can stop the machine. This is lan-
guage on holiday.48 Such language produces far more problems
than it solves, and the biggest problem of all is that it projects a
deeply sexist notion of sexual difference onto every human phe-
nomenon.
What we need, then, is a psychoanalytic theory that truly seeks

to understand the consequences of human “one-sexedness” with-
out thinking in terms of either castration or femininity, but also
without denying the fact that male and female bodies are different.
Many different kinds of analysts are producing such theories. This
chapter is not trying to say that we do not need psychoanalysis—it
is trying to say that psychoanalysis does not need a femininity
theory.49
From castration to finitude

Here is a beginning of such a theory. Joyce McDougall has pro-
vided an interesting definition of psychoanalysis. She considers
psychoanalysis to be a form of thought that attempts to understand
the psychic consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that
there are others; the fact of sexual difference; and the fact of death.50
We note that only one of the three traumas has to do with the
discovery of sex and sexual difference, yet Lacanian theory tends to
use the concept of castration as a general term for all three traumas.
As we have seen, this amounts to projecting an ideologically dubi-
ous notion of sexual difference onto the two other traumas—that is,
to just about everything. Castration is simply too sexist a term to be
useful as a general term for human limitation or lack. I want to
propose that on this general level, we speak, instead, of “finitude”.
Following McDougall, we can then understand psychoanalysis as a
theory devoted to the exploration of the many different ways in
which human beings deal with the traumatic discovery of their
finitude, not as a theory that declares castration to be the key to
human existence.
I take the concept of finitude from Stanley Cavell’s analysis of
scepticism in The Claim of Reason. “In the face of the skeptic’s
picture of intellectual limitedness”, Cavell writes, “Wittgenstein
proposes a picture of human finitude” (Cavell, 1979, p. 431). But
Cavell is not the only one to speak of human finitude, in the sense
of our finiteness, our limitedness, the fact that we are not all, not
everything. A distinguished psychoanalyst of transsexuality also
speaks of finitude (Chiland, 1997, p. 246). From different perspec-
tives, then, philosophers such as Cavell and Wittgenstein and
122 TORIL MOI
analysts such as Chiland and McDougall claim that the discovery

of our separate, sexed, mortal existence is traumatic, and that the
human task par excellence is to try to come to terms with this
discovery and this trauma. In a passage displaying striking affini-
ties with psychoanalytic thought, Cavell writes:
If Rousseau can be said to have discovered the fact of child-
hood in human growth, and Wordsworth the loss of childhood,
then romanticism generally may be said to have discovered the
fact of adolescence, the task of wanting and choosing adult-
hood, along with the impossibility of this task. The necessity of
the task is the choice of finitude, which for us (even after God)
means the acknowledgment of the existence of finite others,
which is to say, the choice of community, of autonomous moral
existence [Cavell, 1999, p. 464]
To this fundamental insight I want to add something. I want

to suggest that we need to distinguish between three different
aspects of finitude. This is partly inspired by McDougall’s three
traumas, partly by Colette Chiland’s explicit reference to our
“ontological, sexed and temporal finitude” (Chiland, 1997, p. 247).
On this view, to acknowledge finitude would mean to undertake
three different tasks. First we need to acknowledge our spatial
finitude—that is to say, our bodily, existential separation from
others.51 Then we need to acknowledge our sexual finitude, to
understand that we cannot be more than one sex. McDougall
writes of the traumatic discovery of our “monosexuality”
(McDougall, 1995, p. 6). Chiland writes of the transsexual’s refusal
of “sexed finitude” (Chiland, 1997, p. 247). Intersexed people, bi-
sexuals, transsexuals, transvestites, and other transgendered peo-
ple are neither more nor less sexually finite than anyone else. Our
desires may be infinite; our bodies certainly are not.52 The third
task is to acknowledge the temporal finitude—the inevitable
death—of those we love, and of ourselves. Of course, these tasks
are beyond our powers. Only a saint could accomplish them all.
Yet if we fail in them entirely, we will not be able to live.
For over a hundred years now, psychoanalysis has patiently
shown how difficult it is for human beings to accomplish the “task
of adolescence”, to choose finitude. This is the strength and glory of
psychoanalytic thought. We cling to fantasies of merger with or
eradication of the other, we want to be all sexes or none, we want
immortality and omnipotence. His Majesty the Baby, as Freud calls

this mightily egocentric creature, has no capacity for coexistence
with others. Only those who have a sense of their own and other
people’s finitude can hope to create something like a human com-
munity, Cavell writes. Lacan would perhaps have said that “Only
those who have taken up a position in relation to the phallus can
enter into the symbolic order.” My point is that the same funda-
mental idea is at stake in these two formulations, but that Lacan’s
formulation is sexist (and philosophically unclear) in a way that
Cavell’s is not.
The realization of finitude is traumatic for everyone. Here it is
crucial to disentangle relevant from irrelevant sexualization (or
“genderization”) of psychic issues. I agree with Freud and Lacan
that there is probably sexuality in everything. But to say this is not
to say that there is sexually different sexuality in everything, nor to
say that everything can be reduced to sexuality. It is unlikely, to say
the least, that all women experience finitude differently from all
men in all its three aspects. To use castration or the more euphemis-
tic lack as a general term for finitude is to impose a generalizing
theory of sexual difference on all three traumas. Apart from ideo-
logical obfuscation, I fail to see what is achieved by doing that.
Freud himself writes: “There is only one libido, which serves both
the masculine and the feminine sexual function. To it itself we
cannot assign any sex” (Freud, 1937c, p. 131). Freud here acknowl-
edges, if only for a moment, that there may be phenomena, even
intensely sexual phenomena, that have no sex (or gender, if one
prefers). This moment of wonderful promise is instantly squashed,
and Freud never returns to the possibility of human as opposed to
sexed drives.53
To summarize and clarify: I have said that Lacanian and Freud-
ian theory uses “castration” in three different senses:
1. general human lack, finitude;

2. specific feminine lack/sexual difference;
3. discovery that we can only ever be one sex.
In this picture, sexual difference tends to become the difference, the

lack, that grounds all other differences. Finitude, on the other hand,
is the traumatic discovery of three irreducible facts:
124 TORIL MOI
1. There are others.

2. There are others of a sex that is different from mine.
3. There is death.
In this scheme, finitude does not have to be figured as lack.54 Sexual

difference is a crucial element, but it is neither more nor less
important than the two other aspects of finitude. In particular, it is
not the foundation or paradigm of all kinds of finitude and differ-
ence. Yet the discovery of one’s sexual finitude, one’s “one-
sexedness”, is a foundational human trauma and needs to be
acknowledged. The big question is how to do this in ways that do
not result in sexism and injustice. To eradicate awareness of sexual
difference usually amounts to assimilating women to the male
norm. To overemphasize sexual difference is usually tantamount to
locking women up in their female difference. (My argument in this
chapter has been that classical psychoanalytic femininity theory
does both.) This scheme, moreover, gives us no grounds on which
to go around “gendering the world” by projecting sexual differ-
ence on to all kinds of human qualities and activities.
Analysts and theorists ought to reserve the term “castration”
for cases where people actually do fantasize, fear, worry about
losing their sexual powers. (It makes no sense to call a sexually
powerful woman castrated just because the theory implies that she
must be.) They should also stop speaking of castration when what
they have in mind is the most general sense of lack, for this
amounts to imposing a sexist and sexualizing term on all of human
existence.
For a philosopher of finitude, human psychic pain arises from
the finitude of the human body. It is our bodies that are separate,
sexed, and mortal. This is our human condition; and the task of
finitude is to acknowledge it. No wonder that religions, vast phi-
losophies, and innumerable works of art have arisen in the attempt.
Psychoanalysis has always been a distinguished participant in the
attempt to teach human beings to come to terms with finitude. But
finitude is not the same thing as lack. Must the fact of finitude, the
fact of being separate, sexed, and mortal, be figured as lack?
A final point: Lacanians will inevitably find that I have misun-
derstood and misinterpreted Lacan. (To some Lacanians the very
fact of disagreeing with Lacan is evidence that one has failed to

understand him.) They should bear in mind that my most funda-
mental critique of Lacan is external to Lacanianism and cannot be
translated into Lacanian terms without significant distortion. Even
if I have totally misunderstood what the phallus is and quite mixed
up the meaning of femininity, masculinity, and jouissance, that
would not invalidate my major claims. I have claimed that Lacan’s
theory of sexual difference is a machine that churns out gender
labels; that the spatial image of language that underpins Lacanian
theory requires defence and justification; that Lacanian theory
reduces language to representation and thus fails to have a theory
of language; that Lacan’s gendered fascination with women’s
knowledge of sexual pleasure cannot yield a theory of women (or
femininity). I have also claimed that the muddled and generalized
use of the term castration is sexist and that the concept of finitude
offers better and less sexist ways of theorizing the same aspects of
human existence. Above all, I have claimed that psychoanalysis
does not need a femininity theory, and that femininity theories
inevitably turn men into the norm and women into the other.
Anyone who wants to defend Freud or Lacan’s femininity theories
needs to show that these claims are wrong, misconceived, or irrel-
evant.
NOTES
This chapter was first published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2004): 841–878. Reprinted by permission of the Univer-
sity of Chicago. Copyright 2004 by the University of Chicago Press.
1. Freud’s interest in the decay of women of thirty had deep cultural roots
in Europe. The best example is probably Balzac’s La Femme de trente ans [The
woman of thirty],which the author started to write in 1842, at the age of twenty-
nine.
2. In an essay called “Is Anatomy Destiny?” (reprinted in What Is a
Woman?, Moi, 1999, pp. 369–393) I show how I arrive at this conclusion. The
present chapter returns to some of the questions left unanswered in “Is
Anatomy Destiny?”
3. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953), particularly the chapter, “Child-
hood”.
4. See, for example, Benjamin, 1988; Chodorow, 1993; Horney, 1973;
McDougall, 1995; Mitchell, 1974, 2000, just to mention a few important works in
English.
126 TORIL MOI
5. I write at length about this opposition in the title essay of What Is a

Woman? (Moi, 1999, pp. 3–120).
6. This is not just a Western phenomenon: Lacan is taught in humanities
departments all over the globe.
7. Freud and Lacan are, of course, not the only psychoanalysts who try to
theorize women. To investigate post-Freudian femininity theories from Karen
Horney and Helene Deutsch through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray to Jessica
Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow would be the task of a book. Perhaps this
essay can be thought of as a kind of preface to such investigations.
8. I hope to write an essay about equality, difference, and feminist theory
some day.
9. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is an example of the kind of investigation of
women’s lived experience that I am looking for. Beauvoir at once rejects
femininity theories and tries to account for the specific ways in which the fact
of being a woman comes to matter to the individual woman and to society.
10. Some of Lacan’s most brilliant ideas are not at all caught up in feminin-
ity talk and have nothing to do with the nature of language and the beyond.
His account of subject formation as an effect of alienation in the mirror stage,
for example, so impressed Beauvoir that she made it foundational to The Second
Sex (see Lacan, 1938). William F. Bracken’s dissertation, “Becoming Subjects:
The Agency of Desire in Lacan’s Return to Freud”, shows how philosophically
interesting this theory is (Bracken, 1998).
11. “That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incom-
plete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly”, Freud writes in
his 1933 essay on “Femininity” (Freud, 1933a, p. 135).
12. This is not just a feminist gripe, for many analysts have said the same
thing. Joyce McDougall, for example, writes: “Although he believed himself to
be an objective observer, Freud’s two renowned articles on female sexuality
reveal, in limpid fashion, the extent to which he was imbued with the conven-
tional, moralistic attitude of his day” (McDougall, 1995, p. 220).
13. The best theorist of the concept of situation in relation to women is, of
course, Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex. See also my discussion of the
concept in Moi, 1999, pp. 59–83.
14. The most famous exponent of this view is Juliet Mitchell (1974).
15. The kind of “picture” I have in mind is this: “A picture held us captive.
And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed
to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein, 1953, §115).
16. Anyone interested in further investigation of the concept of femininity
in Freud should also look at the following texts, which I do not discuss here:
Freud, 1908d, 1912d, 1918a, 1924d, 1930a, 1931b.
17. See my discussion of this dilemma in Moi, 1999, pp. 202–207.
18. Translation amended. For the French text, see Beauvoir, 1949, Vol. 1,
p. 14. Some people think that Beauvoir’s ideas of femininity are as retrograde
as Freud’s. I cannot engage in that discussion here, but I have tried to show
why this is wrong, for example in the title essay of What Is a Woman? (Moi,
1999).
19. In Mad Men and Medusas Juliet Mitchell claims that Freud’s theory of
femininity is a theory not of femininity but of hysteria. By the late 1920s,
Mitchell argues, all the features Freud used to consider characteristic of hyste-
ria had been transferred to the concept of femininity: “When at the end of his
life, Freud claimed that the bedrock beneath which psychoanalysis could not
penetrate was the more or less biological one of a universal tendency by both
sexes to repudiate femininity, he was making the mistake that has been widely
reiterated: it is hysteria that cannot be tolerated, the conditions of hysteria that
everyone wishes to repudiate” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 186). I do not know whether
Mitchell thinks that there still could be a good psychoanalytic theory of feminin-
ity.
20. Jane Gallop puts it well: “Probably all Lacan’s advocates somewhere
make the point that his detractors misread him by failing to distinguish the
phallus from the penis” (Gallop, 1985, p. 134).
21. “Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take
us far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find expression in differ-
ences of psychical development” (Freud, 1924d, p. 177). Colette Chiland suc-
cinctly rejects the belief that anybody who fights for equal rights for women
must deny all sexual differences (see Chiland, 1999, p. 15).
22. For the French text, see Lacan, 1966, p. 686.
24. Many readers of Lacan have stumbled over the “real phallus”. In
Reading Lacan Jane Gallop proposes that we read it ironically, yet not without
criticism: “Thus his ‘real phallus’ would be simply an ironic use of the term, his
mockery of the way others understand it. So be it. But nonetheless I think that
such subtleties of irony never leave their user uncontaminated” (Gallop, 1985,
p. 144). Irony is a matter of tone: I do not hear irony in the sentence in question.
Be that as it may. Tim Dean thinks the “real phallus” has to do with the
Lacanian real: “The way in which the real functions as a logical limit prompts
Lacan to speak of a real phallus, for jouissance is real, and the phallus signifies
a limit to the jouissance we can access” (Dean, 2000, p. 88). I think it is highly
unlikely that Lacan’s reference to the real phallus in 1958 has anything to do
with setting a limit to jouissance, which was only theorized in 1972–73.
26. Lacanian theory has indeed been used to support heterosexist posi-
tions, for example in the French debates about the so-called pacs (pacts of civic
solidarity, a form of marriage for homosexuals and heterosexuals). Tim Dean
would disagree with me. He is critical of the concept of the phallus but
nevertheless finds explicit criticism of heterosexuality in the essay I am discuss-
ing here. Lacan, he writes, “consistently pokes fun at the heterosexist idée reçu
[sic] that genital relations between the sexes represent an idea for psychological
maturity” (Dean, 2000, p. 49). The passage he adduces for this claim is the
following, which I quote in Rose’s translation: “Admittedly it was French
psychoanalysts, with their hypocritical notion of genital oblativity, who started
up the moralizing trend which, to the tune of Salvationist choirs, is now
followed everywhere” (Lacan, 1958, p. 81). I think that Dean misreads this
passage. The key phrase here is “genital oblativity”, which means something
like “self-sacrificing genitality”. This is a critique not of heterosexuality but of
Daniel Lagache. Lagache was Lacan’s contemporary and a leading French
analyst in the 1950s. His two-volume opus La Jalousie amoureuse contains a
128 TORIL MOI
theory of different types of love (Lagache, 1947). One is “oblative love” [amour
oblatif], defined as totally self-sacrificing, heterosexual love (Lagache makes
patient Griselda look like the ideal wife). To criticize the idea that heterosexual
sexuality is devotedly self-sacrificing is hardly to criticize heterosexuality as
such. (For more information about Daniel Lagache, see Roudinesco, 1986, pp.
227–235.)
27. Lacan writes: “This follows from the intervention of an ‘appearing’
which gets substituted for the ‘having’ so as to protect it on one side and to
mask its lack on the other” (Lacan, 1958, p. 84).
29. Received opinion is that whereas Freud was a biological determinist,
Lacan theorizes gender in a more progressive manner. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan is
one among many to voice such a view: “Freud’s error was to mistake a
structural, symbolic, and representational drama for a natural one based on
biology. . . . [Lacan] argued that a person becomes male or female by identify-
ing (or not) as the phallic signifier, and not by any innate mechanism”
(Ragland-Sullivan, 1987, p. 269). My argument is that neither Freud nor Lacan
are biological determinists but that Lacan’s structuralism makes him far more
metaphysical than Freud.
30. Beauvoir drew on Lacan for her understanding of girls’ psychosexual
development. The key Lacanian term for her was alienation and the key text a
long encyclopaedia entry by Lacan from 1938, published separately much later
as Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu (Lacan, 1938).
31. Judith Butler sets out in the opposite direction. She considers that the
phallus “both stands for the part, the organ, and is the imaginary transfigura-
tion of that part” (Butler, 1993, p. 79). To her, it follows that the phallus is an
imaginary effect, which means that we are free to think of it as a transferable
object of pleasure available to anyone, including lesbians. “Indeed, ‘the’ lesbian
phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a theoretically useful one”, writes Butler (1993,
p. 85). Tim Dean thinks that the phallus is a “giant red herring” (Dean, 2000, p.
14)—that is to say, a concept made obsolete by Lacan’s later theory (particularly
the theory of the objet a, so that all we need to do is to “move beyond
interminable and increasingly sterile debates over the phallogocentric biases of
Lacan’s account of the phallus toward a more interesting ‘60s Lacan’ of the
object” (Dean, 2000, p. 50).
32. Let me stress again that I think we should distinguish between three
different theories in Lacan and Freud—namely, between their theories of (1)
the body, (2) the relationship between the body and sexed and gendered
subjectivity (here we should further distinguish between the general under-
standing and the specific story being offered as an exemplification of that
understanding), and (3) sexual difference.
33. By far the best discussion of the connection between the pacs and parity
debates is Anne F. Garréta’s “Re-enchanting the Republic: Pacs, Parité and Le
Symbolique” (Garréta, 2001). Joan W. Scott’s essay remains the most thoughtful
one on the parity debate (Scott, 1997); it was included as part of a special section
on parity in the journal differences (1997), which also contained interesting
papers by Françoise Gaspard (1997) and a very interesting roundtable discus-
sion (Rosanvallon, Collin, & Lipietz, 1997). The French journal Nouvelles Ques-
tions Féministes published two special issues on parity, one in favour and one
against (see Gaspard, Viennot, & Lipietz, 1994; Le Doeuff, Varikas, & Trat,
1995). The sociologist Eric Fassin’s analysis of Mona Ozouf’s successful and—
to non-French feminists—deeply annoying Women’s Words: Essay on French
Singularity contains a wealth of information on French discussions of American
feminism (Ozouf, 1995), as well as an astute analysis of the sexual ideology at
work in the parity debates in France (Fassin, 1999). Anyone interested in seeing
examples of the reactionary uses of Lacanian theory in the parité and pacs
debates may consult Agacinski, 1999; Anatrella, 1998, 1999; Lamizet, 2001;
Sausse, 1999; Tincq, 1999; Trigano, 1998. A welcome Lacanian exception to the
rule of sexism and heterosexism is Tort, 1999. Note that quotations from Le
Monde without a page reference come from the Web. They can be found on two
different websites by searching for the name of the author: Le Monde’s own web
archives (http://archives.lemonde.fr) and Lexis-Nexis Academic (http://
web.lexis-nexis.com).
34. In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler also refers to the reactionary
Lacanian positions in the controversy over the pacs. On this point, her conclu-
sion is similar to mine: “The [Lacanian] structure is purely formal, its defenders
say, but note how its very formalism secures the structure against critical
challenge. . . . [This] structure works to domesticate in advance any radical
reformulation of kinship” (Butler, 2000, p. 71).
35. Lacan (1998) is the only complete English translation of Encore.
Strangely, the translator makes no mention of Jacqueline Rose’s excellent
and widely used 1982 translation of important excerpts (see Mitchell & Rose,
1982).
36. As mentioned before, I have yet to find a serious investigation into the
differences and similarities of the uses of these terms.
37. In “Beyond the Phallus”, Gallop provides a nice set of quotations
claiming that jouissance is impossible to translate (see Gallop, 1988, pp. 119–
120).
38. Gallop rightly thinks this has something to do with Roland Barthes’s
distinction between plaisir and jouissance in Le Plaisir du texte (Gallop, 1988,
pp. 120–121). For Barthes’s French text, see Barthes, 1973; for an English trans-
lation, see Barthes, 1975. The date of Barthes’ book is significant: he may well
have attended Lacan’s, 1972–73 seminar.
39. Rose summarizes the problems arising from Lacan’s talk of women’s
orgasms as an ecstasy “beyond the phallus”: “Jouissance is used . . . to refer to
that moment of sexuality which is always in excess, something over and above
the phallic term which is the mark of sexual identity. The question Lacan
explicitly asks is that of woman’s relation to jouissance. It is a question which
can easily lapse into a mystification of woman as the site of truth.—This is
why Lacan’s statements in Encore, on the one hand, have been accused of
being complicit with the fantasy they try to expose, and, on the other, have
led to attempts to take the ‘otherness’ of femininity even further, beyond the
limits of language which still forms the basis of Lacan’s account” (Rose, 1982,
p. 137).
130 TORIL MOI
40. Wittgenstein’s discussion of concepts with “blurred edges” is also

relevant here, for it gives us reason to ask whether there are situations and
concepts where boundaries and limits are not particularly useful metaphors
(see Wittgenstein, 1953, §71).
41. Cavell’s essays on Othello and The Winter’s Tale are collected in Cavell,
1987.
42. This is Diamond’s summary of Elizabeth Anscombe’s point. In the
same essay Diamond argues that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus makes a power-
ful argument against the idea that there is a distinction to be drawn between
“good nonsense and bad, [between] illuminating nonsense and dark murky
muddle” (Diamond, 2000, p. 160). Whether or not this is a fair reading of the
Tractatus is a question I do not feel equipped to answer. Diamond’s other path-
breaking essays on Wittgenstein are collected in The Realistic Spirit (Diamond,
1995).
43. I note here that the very first sentence of my own preface to The Kristeva
Reader is: “To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia
Kristeva’s project” (Moi, 1986, p. vi).
44. Wittgenstein does not declare, either, that only easy or simple or
uncomplicated language makes sense. I imagine that he might agree that it is
not always easy to determine whether or not language makes sense. Few
writers are as difficult to read as Wittgenstein himself. Yet his difficulty is
caused by an attempt to get clear on difficult issues. It is not caused by any
underlying belief in the ultimate meaningfulness, let alone the revolutionary
power, of foggy and incoherent language.
45. To refuse the idea that there is something called femininity that gives
rise to some special kind of “mad language” is self-evidently not to reject the
idea of the unconscious. Ordinary procedures for making sense of words
include the techniques used by analysts and literary critics. The analyst knows
only too well that the analysand can use all kinds of language as forms of
defence and resistance. She also knows how to listen for the whole speech act:
the context, the silences, the tone, the affect, the body language. The fundamen-
tal assumption of the analyst and the literary critic is always that the language
in question is the way it is, whether highly organized or utterly fragmented, for
good reasons. To say that some or all of those reasons are unconscious is to say
that the speaker or writer in question does not know, or does not want to know,
what they are. To listen for the unconscious is to listen to what we are actually
saying, not to something else. Both Freud and Lacan take for granted that the
unconscious shows up in language. The same is true for Julia Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic linguistics, which are based on the assumption that desire is in
language. Kristeva’s first collection of essays in English was called, precisely,
Desire in Language (Kristeva, 1980).
46. For some thoughts on what it would take to bring about an encounter
between psychoanalysis and philosophy in general, see Stanley Cavell’s essay
“Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Moments of Letter from an Unknown Woman”,
reprinted as Chapter 2 of Contesting Tears (Cavell, 1996). So far, the best
attempts to bring about an encounter between post-structuralism and the
“new” Wittgensteinian perspective are Cavell’s critique of Derrida’s reading of
J. L. Austin (Cavell, 1994, pp. 53–127) and Martin Stone’s “Wittgenstein on

Deconstruction” (Stone, 2000, pp. 83–117). The earliest and most accessible
introduction to these questions remains Cavell’s “The Politics of Interpreta-
tion” (1982). For a challenging presentation of the “new” Wittgensteinians, see
Crary & Read, 2000.
47. Lacan writes: “One of [Freud’s] last articles turns on the irreducibility
for any finite [endliche] analysis of the effects following from the castration
complex in the masculine unconscious and from Penisneid [penis envy] in the
unconscious of the woman” (Lacan, 1958, p. 75).
48. Wittgenstein writes: “For philosophical problems arise when language
goes on holiday” (Wittgenstein, 1953, §38).
49. Many contemporary analysts write about psychic pain and pleasure
without indulging in generalizations about sexual difference or femininity.
Names such as Jonathan Lear, Adam Phillips, Christopher Bollas, Nina Coltart,
and Joyce McDougall instantly come to mind, but there are so many others.
50. I am elaborating on McDougall’s brief formulation. She does not relate
this brilliant thought to castration and sexual difference (see McDougall, 1995,
p. xv).
51. In “Psychoanalysis and Cinema”, Cavell notes that in his reading of E.
T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-Man” Freud explicitly denies the possibility that
the question of “our knowledge of the existence of other minds” can be a source
of the uncanny in the tale. Instead, Freud insists that “the uncanny in
Hoffmann’s tale is directly attached to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes,
and hence, given his earlier findings, to the castration complex” (Cavell, 1996,
p. 110). In this way Freud loses out on an opportunity to reflect on the wider
consequences of human separation.
52. To me, this is one way of glossing Freud’s famous speculation that
“Something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the
realization of complete satisfaction” (Freud, 1912d, pp. 188–189).
53. I say the moment of promise is squashed because Freud’s sentence
does not stop here: “To it itself we cannot assign any sex”, he writes, “if,
following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are in-
clined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers trends
with a passive aim” (Freud, 1933a, p. 131). This comes only a few pages after
his stern warning against equating femininity with passivity (see p. 115)! It is
disheartening to note that Lacan converts Freud’s half-hearted alignment of the
libido with masculinity into a clear espousal of the primacy of the phallus:
“[O]ne can glimpse the reason for a feature which has never been elucidated
and which again gives a measure of the depth of Freud’s intuition”, he writes,
“namely, why he advances the view that there is only one libido, his text clearly
indicating that he conceives of it as masculine in nature” (Lacan, 1958, p. 85;
emphasis added).
54. The formulation owes something to a comment in a brilliant exam
paper written in February 2003 by Magdalena Ostas, a graduate student in the
Literature Program at Duke University, in the context of a discussion of Cavell,
Wittgenstein, and Derrida: “The fact of finitude does not have to be expressed
as lack”.
132 TORIL MOI
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Femininity theory, theories of women,

or feminist theory?
Ebba Witt-Brattström
I
n “What Is a Woman?” Toril Moi argues that Freud may have
been a man with biased views on women, but he was not a
biological determinist, despite his belief that “our anatomy
and our biological needs will make psychic conflict inevitable”
(Moi, 1999, p. 380). This argument is the background to Moi’s
chapter, “From femininity to finitude: Freud, Lacan, and feminism,
again” (Chapter 7, this volume). Moi’s speciality as a scholar can be
said to be “appropriating” (note the Marxist flavour!), in the name
of feminist theory, “appropriate” supposedly gender-neutral, that
is, patriarchal theories such as psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan,
Kristeva), existentialist phenomenology (Simone de Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), and Bourdieu’s sociology and philosophy
of language (Austin, Cavell, Wittgenstein). In Chapter 7, one finds
an excellent although short example of Moi’s appropriation
method. Working from Freud’s own methodological reflection in
“The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”
(Freud, 1920a), Moi is able to show how the generalizing tendency
of traditional psychoanalytic “femininity theory” becomes the an-
tithesis to Freud’s own psychoanalytic method, defined as an in-
quiry into individual cases, which looks backwards instead of
137
138 EBBA WITT - BRATTSTRÖM
forwards and therefore does not predict or regulate the subject’s

future.
In a more edifying sense, Moi has been able to appropriate
Simone de Beauvoir’s theories in The Second Sex. “I read as the
woman I am”, writes Moi in What is a Woman? (Moi, 1999, p. 205).
This assertion is the distinctive feature of a typical Moi text: a
theoretical, philosophical, feminist essay that is personal and theo-
retical at the same time. Moi has found Beauvoir’s theory of the
embodied, sexually different human being useful in her quest for a
theory of subjectivity that does not exclude women’s experiences
or their agency: “Subjectivity (and agency) has always been at the
heart of my interests” (p xii). So, when Moi confronts psychoanaly-
sis, or specifically Freud and Lacan, with the question “what is a
woman?” (defined in Beauvarian terms), she finds no answers
aside from castration as a synonym for femininity. All his women
patients wanted psychoanalysis to give them a penis, Freud stated
in 1937—the year Freud lost his dearest correspondent, Lou
Andreas-Salomé, for whom the concept of penis envy was cultur-
ally constructed, a token of mistaken modernity, when women
started to compete with men on their premises (Andreas-Salomé,
1928, p 241). With Lacan, women became doubly marked by ab-
sence, lack, and castration. Such theories of castration, penis envy,
and the phallus are clearly sexist in Beauvoir’s sense: they deny
women universality as women, without losing their particularity.
Moi’s critique of the self-willed use of the concept of castration is
merciless, and her dismissal of “femininity theory” for the good of
“theories of women” is stimulating. But what happened to “femi-
nist theory”?
* * *
Let me first state that this is an exciting chapter, going straight to
the core of feminism’s problem with “the holy Grail of psychoana-
lytic inquiry: the riddle of femininity”. Although I definitely share
Moi’s weariness of the patriarchal equation of woman with castra-
tion, I have my doubts about dumping femininity theory in the
dustbin of history. Her solution to the problem of female particu-
larity and her strategy for an egalitarian future—the suggestion
that psychoanalysis should be the theory and therapy of human
FEMININITY THEORY 139
finitude—is to me, despite its elegance, something like throwing

the baby out with the bathwater. Moi runs the risk of using human
finitude as a political alibi, a moral shortcut through the swamps of
femininity to the Valhalla of universality (at the cost of the particu-
larity of both men and women, I would add). What is more, I do
not believe that the three aspects of human finitude specified by
Moi with the help of Joyce McDougall—the discovery of the other,
the discovery of one-sexedness, and the discovery of death—are
not gendered in any way. If, as Freud’s concept of epistemophilia
teaches us—and Moi has written brilliantly about it (Moi, 1999, pp.
348–368)—intellectual work begins in and with the body, then the
desire for knowledge—about the nature of the other, about the
meaning of sexual difference and procreation, about death—has to
be gendered since our bodies are gendered, which consequently
makes psychic conflict “inevitable”, to quote again Moi’s rehabili-
tation of Freud in “What is a woman?”
I would ask you to consider my own dilemma. Am I to follow
Moi’s recommendation to stop studying femininity theories (and
the Freudian is the most interesting one)? Trying to give my ana-
lytical attention to individual cases as they are put forward by the
female literary tradition, I find it impossible to choose between
femininity theories and theories of women. My own experience of
thirty years as a literary scholar specializing in women authors of
various periods has taught me that the material given to us by the
literary tradition is hard to understand without knowledge of
historically pervasive discourses on women’s so called nature. In
order to do theories of women, to understand their testimonies, if
you like, in history, but also in contemporary literature, we need to
apply femininity theory.
And I would never want to choose between Freud and Lacan in
this respect. Does one have to? I would rather stick to Juliet
Mitchell’s recommendation of 1974: Freudian and Lacanian
thought does not offer a recommendation for, but an analysis of
patriarchal society. Mitchell (and Jacqueline Rose) offered to a
whole generation of intellectual feminists a shift from a literal
reading of feminine sexuality in terms of penis envy to the struc-
tural role of lack in the gender binary (Mitchell, 1974; Mitchell &
Rose, 1982). Theirs might not be the solution for today, but it
marked a historical moment in our quest for an analysis of how

sexual differences operate in society, for an understanding of the
genesis of gender formation and an explanation for the asymmetri-
cal power relations constituted by sexual difference.
I do, however, agree with Moi that we now have to take a
decisive step out of the grips of phallic feminism, but I will venture
to propose another way for women to claim universality as
women. Is “feminist theory” (this contradiction in terms) perhaps a
synonym of “theories of women”? To me, feminism has to do with
political advocacy and agency that questions the confusion of biol-
ogy with culture when it comes to women, and theory is but a
statement of the facts on which practice depends. (Theory, accord-
ing to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the Greek word
“thea”, which is the root for looking at, viewing, contemplating.) In
the term “feminist theory”, politics and subjectivity combine to
disrupt the “scientific” objectivity that patriarchal theory claims
for itself. Thus, “feminist theory”, to my understanding, would
be enough to solve the absurd choice between particularity and
universality. Given its focus on particular cases and individual
experiences, feminist theory should avoid the trap of undue gener-
alization that, according to Moi, characterizes femininity theories.
This, as Moi points out, is Beauvoir’s method in The Second Sex,
where she freely uses women’s literature to exemplify different
female experiences. Thus, Beauvoir, but not Moi (although herself
an eminent reader of literary texts) seems to know what a treasure-
chest of female experiences women’s literary tradition is for mak-
ing theories about women.
* * *
This brings me to my last argument and my modest proposal for
the future of feminist psychoanalysis. Allow me a methodological
reflection. When we accept the debates around Freud as the privi-
leged starting point of our feminist–philosophical project, the con-
cern with fighting against the phallus keeps us shut up in a
“picture” that leaves us ignorant about everything outside it. Moi
writes in Chapter 7 (note 15): “A picture (penis) held us captive.
And we could not get outside (beyond) it, for it lay (stood) in our
language (theory) and language (theory) seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably.” In the picture in which we find ourselves today,

where are the founding mothers of psychoanalysis and their dia-
logue with the phallic monism of this theory? Lou Andreas-
Salomé, Karen Horney, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Melanie Klein, and
all the others—what were their opinions on Freud’s femininity
theory, and why do we not bring their arguments into play? How
long will we go on inventing the wheel, or the Anti-Phallus, in
every generation? Why does psychoanalysis not have a female
canon as well as a male? Why do we always have to go to Beauvoir
in order to learn that feminist theory needs its foremother’s experi-
ences of being othered in order to avoid this fate for our grand-
daughters? Because of “the discontinuity in the story of women’s
intellectual effort” (Lerner, 1993, p. 275), are we not all, as Gerda
Lerner has suggested, victims of amnesia when it comes to the
development of a feminist consciousness, which has lived on for
thousands of years in women’s literature but has never been trans-
mitted to us in terms of “theories of women”?
This “her-story” or collective memory entails an epistemologi-
cal tradition, a body of knowledge, figures, and other rhetorical
strategies for depicting more or less repressed human experiences
(childbearing, heterosexual as well as lesbian desire, female aging,
and so on). While working as editor on Nordic Women’s Literary
History, I realized two things: First, women represent, historically,
a different tradition of knowledge. The female author is a kind of
political philosopher: she must produce her own system of under-
standing the world. Surprisingly, this system often turns out to be
a universe of ideas, experiences, observations that differ from those
of men. Second, this worldview often challenges and undermines
patriarchal ideologies and calls into question traditional hierar-
chies of the sexes (and summons men to take responsibility for
their gendered behaviour). The fact that such a great part of wom-
en’s literature has been a literature of testimony—speaking of
structural subordination (for example, cultural representations of
woman as sexual object) and individual oppression (for example,
sexual violence)—is a major reason for its suppression. Another is
the fact that, although the subject positions offered to women in
history have always been connected with the processes of othering,
there is a tradition of resistance to being othered in authorships as
different as St. Bridget of Sweden (fourteenth century) and Doris

Lessing, not to mention a thousand more. In women’s literature the
question “What is a woman?” can be answered in a thousand ways.
More important to us today is that this situation applies to the
question “What is a man?” as well.
* * *
In other words, most women authors refuse to choose between
being a woman and being a human being (particularity and univer-
sality), and, to this end, they adopt different strategies. One way of
resisting the false dilemma is to refuse particularity as a mark only
of femininity. I call this strategy genderizing or particularizing
men, often experienced by men as a “degradation from universal to
particular”. Moi writes that men can be particular and universal at
the same time, but I doubt that they are allowed to (except in
literature and perhaps in love relationships), since there is no one
there to recognize them as such. Beauvoir reflects on this in a well-
known passage of The Second Sex:
[W]oman is defined exclusively in her relation to man. The
asymmetry of the categories—male and female—is made
manifest in the unilateral form of sexual myths. We sometimes
say “the sex” to designate woman; she is the flesh, its delights
and dangers. The truth that for woman man is sex and
carnality has never been proclaimed because there is no one to
proclaim it. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is
the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view,
which they confuse with absolute truth. [de Beauvoir, 1988, p.
174–175]
Simone de Beauvoir points to the shocking truth that for women

men are as much body as gender—that is, they are marked by
particularity just as much as women are for men. In the female
literary tradition, this is a forbidden or muted truth that has had to
be given with precaution, in coded language, especially in histori-
cal times (when male particularity was often depicted with the
defensive use of irony).
To summarize: to do theories of women, or feminist theory, go
to the foremothers in literature and in psychoanalysis. In order to
create symmetry between the terms “man” and “woman”, create a
new, “particular” entry for men (which would be much the same
entry as for women who do not want to trade their particularity for
universality). The time is (over)ripe to give the question “What is a
woman?” its counterpart: “What is a man”?
REFERENCES
Andreas-Salomé, L. (1928). Was daraus folgt, dass es nicht die Frau
gewesen ist, die den Vater totgeschlagen hat. In: I. Weber, & B.
Rempp (Eds.), Lou Andreas Salomé. Das “zweideutige” Lächeln der
Erotik, Texte zur Psyhoanalyse. Freiburg: Kore Verlag, 1990.
Beauvoir, S. de (1988). The Second Sex. London: Pan Books.
woman. S.E., 18.
Lerner, G. (1993). The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. From the
Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Allen Lane.
Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.) (1982). Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan &
the école freudienne. London: Macmillan Press.
Moi, T. (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
CHAPTER NINE
Revisiting the riddle of sex:

an intersubjective view
of masculinity and femininity
Jessica Benjamin
I
n this chapter my aim is to show the consequences of the way
Freud (1933a) posed and solved “the riddle of the nature of
femininity” for our view of both sexuality and gender. I con-
sider how the problem of “excess” generates the split between
activity and passivity, which Freud—for all his warnings against
equating them with gender positions—still took as points on the
compass. Here I am following up on some of my ideas (Benjamin,
1988, 1995, 1996) of how the complementarity of gender is the effect
of splitting. I show how we can read Freud’s own interpretation of
femininity as the turn towards a passive attitude in relation to the
father as the expression of the oedipal boy’s attitude. This view of
femininity expresses the oedipal boy’s need to projectively create
an object that can contain excitement and can hold the place of
passivity. This projection, most particularly, into the figure of the
daughter, is a clue to how Freud shifted from early writings about
hysterical daughters with abusive or intrusive fathers to later writ-
ings in which he defined passive aims in relation to the father as the
essence of the feminine.
I will contend that femininity is not a pre-existing “thing” or
“essence” that is repudiated by the male psyche: rather, it is actu-
145
146 JESSICA BENJAMIN
ally constructed by it. The daughter position, in which the girl

functions as container, helps shore up a masculine self threatened
by oedipal loss, exclusion, or over-stimulation. We might say that
the daughter position is in a double sense the solution to the
problem of sexual passivity as we find it represented by Freud and
correspondingly expressed in the male psyche. Perhaps this is
another way of showing why it is impossible to speak of femininity
as a “thing”, separate from masculinity, for the two are truly
constructs created in the same moment, for the same purpose.
Finally, I close by suggesting another possible processing of passiv-
ity in an intersubjective economy based on working through rather
than repudiating experiences of excess.
An underlying premise of my argument is that passivity is not
in itself intolerable: quite the contrary, it is often pleasurable, but it
becomes so when there is a failure of self-regulation based on
deficient responses by the other—responses variously conceptual-
ized as holding, containment, and mentalization. This failure, ini-
tially an intersubjective one, generates the experience of excess.
By excess I mean, to begin with, more tension than is felt to be
pleasurable or even bearable, particularly by the immature psyche.
One aim of this discussion is to reconsider the experience of passiv-
ity in order to highlight underrepresented, intersubjective solu-
tions to the problem of excess.
The problem of excess

Freud’s notion of sexual pleasure and pain emphasized how we
seek mastery over tension; he conceived of a one-person economy
in which pain is defined as too much tension. But what is it that
makes for too much? From an intersubjective point of view, pleas-
ure and pain occur within a two-person relationship. They are
psychic experiences having to do with how we register the re-
sponses of another and how the other registers us. Psychic pain in
its intersubjective aspect is linked to failures of recognition and
regulation, to arousal caused by inadequate or overwhelming re-
sponses, and to absence of mentalization (Fonagy & Target, 1996).
Eigen (1993), in a viewpoint parallel to my own, stressed the
REVISITING THE RIDDLE OF SEX 147
overwhelming of the psyche by its response to the other’s stimula-

tion.
Without the outside other, the originally helpless self cannot
process internal tension or external stimulation. Without the
mother’s containment of pain and excitement, the baby cannot
self-regulate. But this is a two-way process: the individual’s self-
regulation of arousal and affect and the process of mutual regula-
tion are interdependent (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). Thus an
individual’s state of internal tension is inextricably tied to the
intersubjective tension of recognition between self and other. Rec-
ognition includes not only gratifying but meaning-giving re-
sponses that hold affect as well as giving coherence to the self’s
needs, intentions, and acts. From my perspective, the failure of
tension regulation—excess—is generally linked to failures in rec-
ognition.
Laplanche helped to shape contemporary discussion of excess
by emphasizing the general over-stimulation and mystery attend-
ant on the adult’s transmission of the sexual in the “enigmatic
message” (Laplanche, 1987, 1992, 1995). However, I wish to supple-
ment Laplanche’s view with an intersubjective perspective on
sexuality that also considers how excess results from both specific
and structural misrecognitions: from the lack of direct interper-
sonal recognition of the child’s sexual experience (Davies, 2001) as
well as the general over-stimulation and mystery attendant on the
adult’s transmission of the sexual in the “enigmatic message”
(Laplanche, 1987, 1992, 1995). In Laplanche’s reframing of the se-
duction theory, the excess that is sexuality always begins with an
unconscious communication from the other—the parent’s sexual-
ity as not yet comprehended by the child. Laplanche contends that
Freud was too concrete in thinking that seduction must be either
real or imagined and missed the category of the message, the
transmission of affect and excitement without literal seduction. In
Laplanche’s view, the enigmatic message is constitutive of the
child’s unconscious. Sexuality is inherently mysterious because
the child cannot comprehend what the adult wants from the child.
Stein (1998) has elaborated how the enigmatic message generates
the poignancy of sex and how the excessive takes us beyond
representation into an experience of otherness and mystery.
My reading of the enigmatic message here is somewhat dif-

ferent from Stein’s because I want to distinguish more sharply
between the otherness that is mysterious and that which is mystify-
ing: in the mystifying aspect, affective tension that could not be
understood, represented, or “bound” in dialogic exchange appears
later as though self-originating, a one-person fantasy (a real ap-
pearance). Thus the position of passivity can be analysed as an
effect of a particular relation to an other rather than seeing it as an
innate instinctual position.
For instance, Isabelle, a daughter who learned to be a container
for her mother, tells of her mother’s invasive excitement, dancing
around the room while her daughter practiced piano. This message
about her mother’s internal state, which reappeared in Isabelle’s
fantasies about herself, made her own desires confusing—were
they mother’s or her own? The vicissitudes of excitement and the
ability to contain arousal is linked in complex ways to the con-
scious and unconscious aspects of communication with a specific
other. This relational aspect, as Stein points out, disappears in
Laplanche’s abstract conception of parental sexuality as a “general-
ized other”.
Psychoanalysis has in recent decades elaborated a far richer
understanding of specific experiences between self and other. Since
the groundbreaking work of Stoller (1975, 1980) and McDougall
(1989, 1995), we recognize how sexual fantasies can be used to solve
problems of differentiation and gender identification, to express
traumatic loss and pain, wishes for reparation and revenge, fears of
fragmentation and destructiveness. They opened up our work to
the insight that the peremptory nature of the sexual might be
attributed to the intensity of object loss and not the paramount
effect of the drive.
We now think about how sexuality functions to contain other-
wise unrepresented, unmentalized experiences with significant
others, or how bodily contact can be metaphorically equated in
fantasy with the entry into the other’s mind, the experience of
being recognized or held, invaded or excluded. We consider the
gradations of the desire to reach the other, the frustrated despera-
tion to get in accompanied by urgent need to discharge, the differ-
ent inflections of the wish to enter or be entered: from the wish to
be held safely to the urge to break in forcibly, from the wish to be

known to the wish to be cracked open. We may think of sexuality
as a means of expressing the need to get me into you, or get you
into me; but conversely, we may think that the experience of
excitement generates or intensifies the need to get in, as in, “Help
me contain this tension; let me put this tension into you.” Thus we
have a whole lexicon of experiences involving the causes and
effects of uncontained sexual excitement and unmanageable
arousal, in which we alternately see sexuality as a motive and as a
vehicle of expression.
Along these lines, Stein (1998) has suggested that we find “sexu-
ality suitable to serve as one of the most powerful coins in the
mental trade between different levels and contents” (p. 254). Ana-
lysts now work in both directions, not only “discovering sexual
themes and motivations behind the ostensibly non-sexual” (p. 254)
but finding other motives in the sexual.
Thus the introduction of intersubjective considerations does not
obviate a notion of the intrapsychic perspective: each is alternately
valuable. But adding the intersubjective does delimit the place of
the intrapsychic. Unprocessed, undigested affect can, in the ab-
sence of a transforming, regulating other, still be intrapsychically
processed through forms of sexual excitement, more or less disso-
ciated from other affective experience. Failures in affective contain-
ment may be reworked and translated into sexual tension—they
may or may not reflect some interpersonal transmission of uncon-
scious sexual content. As Stein has put it, “it seems that the human
organism has the capacity to [use sexualization] to deal with the
excess . . . in other words, sexualisation is a capacity, a positive
achievement . . .” (p. 266). Sexual fantasy, on this view, serves the
needs of human creativity and expression. It often stands in for the
outside other; it becomes an Other within. We may wonder to what
degree sexuality serves this function precisely because, as Davies
(2001) put it, a child’s sexuality has not been “embedded in proce-
dural memories of interpersonal safety and containment, they re-
side in large measure in unformulated, oftentimes dissociated
realms . . . unprocessed, unmetabolized” (p. 764).
Excess and the mind–body split

If sexuality provides an alternative register for processing tension
and managing excess, when it functions in lieu of the outside other
or substitutes for communicative and symbolic processes, this can
only work by dint of a split in the self. Above all, by splitting mind
and body, the self can play two parts, with the body as container
for experience that the mind cannot process symbolically. The
body can be employed as an alternative part-self to hold and
discharge the tension of split-off experience with important others.
Painful affect and overwhelming excitement that are left
unprocessed and unrepresented in communicative dialogue can be
represented in sexual fantasy and then discharged physically.
In this manner the patient “Isabelle”, whom I have just men-
tioned and have described elsewhere (Benjamin, 1995), used des-
perate autoerotic activities and fantasies beginning in early
childhood to process her mother’s “enigmatic message”.
Isabelle was referred for analysis by a doctor she had consulted

because she feared that her sexual practices—putting hard ob-
jects inside her—had damaged her vagina. She felt her mother
to have been intensely over-stimulating, transmitting enormous
excitement and anxiety, using Isabelle as a container for her
own excess. Initially, Isabelle would say that she wished I
would be more stimulating and complained of not understand-
ing why I did not give her direction. In one session she wished
that I would say “one really perceptive thing”, would be like
the consulting analyst who referred her, whose comments were
“amazingly pointed . . . and deep . . . hitting a nerve”. Her agita-
tion subsided somewhat when I articulated her fear that I was
not potent enough to penetrate her and handle her sexuality,
that it would overwhelm me.
In effect, Isabelle felt that only if I entered her and structured

her with my mind, containing the tension that had over-
whelmed her mind, could she be safe. But while she expressed
this in terms of being penetrated, it appeared that she needed to
be held and taken into my mind as much as she needed to be
entered. My ability to contact this longing was not unduly
affected by her invidious comparisons and her frustration be-

cause of the transparency of her wish to be recognized by me,
one with which I could readily identify.
In the following session, she began to describe her compulsive
autoerotic activities, which had begun in early childhood. As
she grew older, she felt that she took her mother’s part in her
sexual fantasy, reworking her mother’s scolding assaults into
her sexual experience. She would try to talk to her mother, she
said, “but when I did open up, she’d attack me, but I’d feel
guilty, like I brought it on because I had wanted to talk to
her. . . . If I opened up too much, she’d attack me, so maybe I
took on the role of my mother pushing me. In fact, when I
masturbated, and even now, but then I mean, a voice of power
that I take on tells me I have to do it, and then I endure a state
of orgasm: “You’re gonna do it.” I was like master and slave . . .
there was a giant split between the two sides, a nondescript
voice with complete control versus one that just wanted. I could
only open up to my own inner voice, I could not do it with
anyone else. You are in the camp of anyone else.”
Isabelle describes, in effect, how she has created a split
complementarity of mind and body within herself: the active
doer allied with the observer mind, the passive body self hav-
ing to hold a state of excitement, leading to dissolution of self.
The active master is disembodied, and the embodied self serves
or submits to it. All this within the omnipotence of her own
mind, which cannot dare let the other in. The other is danger-
ous, both shutting her out (as she remembers her mother doing
when her brother was born) or violently intruding (as she,
Isabelle, might have wanted to in her rage at being left out). In
the absence of intersubjective regulation by the other, the ex-
cited sexual body became a split off container for unrepresent-
able pain and for aggression. Both her mother’s aggression, and
her own—as well as the rage she experience in early adoles-
cence which she was forbidden from turning back against her
mother. It is only after this confession of her core anxieties that
Isabelle was able to bear for the first time, at the beginning of
the next session, a moment of silence, a space, a presence that is
non-invasive. That is, she can imagine being held safely in an

other’s mind, without penetrating or being penetrated, in such
a way that her internal tension is regulated.
Isabelle’ story illustrates a mother–child dyad in which excess is

processed through sexualization, through fantasy that explicitly
takes the body as a container for the unbearable. This sexualization
takes the well-known form of complementarity between doer and
done-to, enacted in the intrapsychic fantasy world, we might say,
within the monadic sexual economy. The principal movement in
this economy is not the exchange of recognition, the communica-
tion of affect between subjects, but, rather, a fantasmatic seesaw of
activity and passivity. There is no mutual penetration of minds—
rather, a fantasy of a powerful doer and “the one who submits”.
The monadic economy

The regulation of tension in the monadic economy takes place
through bodily discharge of tension—sometimes compulsively as
for Isabelle. Dimen (2003) has proposed that discharge befits a one-
person model. Freud’s economy of libido as opposed to the idea of
pleasure [Lust] is associated with a kind of sexual hygiene in which
discharge is “the bridge between sexuality and sanity”. I would
distinguish discharge from the two-person economy insofar as the
point is only to regulate one’s own tension, not to enjoy the other or
to contact another mind. Discharge, when it is detached from those
purposes, means the use of the body to solve the problem of mental
excess, that which cannot be held in the dialogically created mental
space.
I believe that these formulations about how we regulate tension
might begin to contribute to a psychoanalytic idea of energy, mov-
ing it out of the instinctual economy of the isolate individual and
recasting it in terms of the intersubjective economy. In introducing
the term “energy”, I am trying to take a step in the dialectic beyond
the relational reversal (e.g. Mitchell, 1988) according to which
sexuality expresses relational configurations. I wish to develop an
economic idea, that within relational configurations we produce
somatic/affective tension—that is, energy—that becomes (materi-
alizes as) sexuality. Work in attachment theory and infancy re-

search has related to the idea of organisms sharing information and
signals as a basis for connection and for some kind of energetic
transformation within the self (e.g. Sander, 2002).
I am suggesting that the concept of energy as a mental, psycho-
logical phenomenon may deepen our intersubjective psychoana-
lytic understanding that the regulation of tension within the
individual includes the transmission of tension and its regulation
or recognition via communication between subjects (see Beebe &
Lachmann, 2002). If we follow Sander’s logic that more specific
recognition allows the dyadic system to contain more complexity,
we might conclude that greater specificity of recognition (under-
standing) allows more tension to be contained and processed. In
terms of energy, we can conceptualize dyadic systems based on
both intrapsychic and intersubjective economies, which interact
with each other. But my argument is that phenomena that appear
as solely intrapsychic productions in the individual should be un-
derstood in terms of intersubjective failures in the original dyadic
systems that resulted in experiences of excess. For instance, when
the other is absent or mentally missing, this may result in an excess
of pain, loss, or flooding.
In addition, I propose that action directed towards discharge on
the part of one partner (a parent)—as we saw with Isabelle’s
mother—increases excess. It readily devolves into looking towards
the child as a holding other reduced to the position of passive
container. Such actions represent a version of discharge whether or
not they are overtly sexual. Such actions, as when an adult con-
scripts a child to contain his sexual energy or tension, appears to
me to be an important dimension of Laplanche’s enigmatic mes-
sage, which, as he suggests, is to be distinguished from concrete
seduction.
Activity and passivity

What are the consequences of uniting such economic ideas of
tension and excess within an intersubjective framework of un-
conscious transmission? These ideas suggest how the polar
complementarity of active–passive is a function of the intrapsychic
economy of discharge—either you put into me or I put into you. It

implies some failure in the intersubjective economy of recognition
and mutual regulation. It would follow that the templates we
define as masculine and feminine and their corresponding appeals
to our impulses towards activity or passivity may be traced back to
the problem of transmission and the processing of excess. Activity
and passivity in the realm of excess can generate a destructive cycle
in which the other is experienced as shutting out, excluding,
uncontaining, thus stimulating or provoking invasion.
I will suggest that the traditional gender solutions to the prob-
lem of excess perpetuate this vicious cycle. Recently, viewing
Bernini’s extraordinary sculpture portraying Apollo and Daphne, I
was struck by the powerlessness and desperation of both male
and female figures locked in an eternal vicious cycle. The male god
enacts a violent grabbiness, as the violated young woman evades
him by hardening her body into bark, her arms reaching away and
upward as they transform into branches. How deeply are our past
and present sexual mythologies, our templates of masculine and
feminine, shaped by this dynamic of invasion and shutting out,
shutting out and struggling to get in?
In this light, let us reprise Freud’s idea of seduction as a trau-
matic experience of helplessness in the face of over-stimulation or
being shut out by the other. I suggest how this experience of excess
leads to a splitting between an active part-self (phallic, mental) and
a passive part-self (container, bodily). We can see how the con-
struction of what Freud understood as femininity actually reflects
an important aversion of the male solution to the problem of
excess.
To begin with, let us consider how the discharge of tension
comes to be associated with activity and to acquire a gendered
meaning as masculine. As I have discussed elsewhere (Benjamin,
1998a, 1998b), an insight into this process was suggested to me by a
discussion of Freud’s (1896b) “Further Remarks on the Neuropsy-
chosis of Defense” (Christiansen, 1993). There Freud observed that
the obsessional position of defensive activity is the characteristi-
cally masculine way of dealing with overstimulation. It rescues the
child from the position of passivity, which is both intolerable and
feminine. Indeed, Christiansen (1993) proposed that we read this to
say that masculinity does not result in, but is first constituted by,
this repudiation of passivity in favour of defensive activity. In the

same defensive move, as the male psyche expels passivity, it cre-
ates through splitting what is called femininity as a projected object
that absorbs what it extrudes.
Now this move is a key to decoding the core fantasy that infuses
the gender positions organized in the Oedipus complex as de-
scribed by Freud (1924d, 1926d)—and less so by subsequent, dis-
senting theorists such as Klein. In the oedipal situation the boy is
liable to feel over-stimulated by his own sexuality and his moth-
er’s, by her message and his unsymbolized response. At the same
time he is in the grip of a disidentification from mother that often
has severe sanctions, in that shame and humiliation are the lot of
boys who wish to hang on to their mothers. Many forces, including
his own need to separate, stimulate his longings for her yet make it
impossible for him to turn to her for containment. The sense of loss
may sound the dominant note, but then again impotence, shame,
confusion, and a range of other affects may play their part. The
experience of having the mother–son couple separated by the fa-
ther can be coded as the fear of being entered by the father (Elise,
2001). Thus the experience of being passively overwhelmed and
abandoned needs to be defended against via projection and identi-
fication with the father–aggressor. The boy establishes his own
activity by projecting the experience of being the passive one onto
the other, creating the split complementarity. He says, in effect: it is
not I but the little sister, the girl, who must be the passive one. As
I see it, this position of being passively stimulated—now associated
with the baby he once was—has traditionally been lodged by the
oedipal boy–mind in the image of the feminine object.
In David Grossman’s (2001) epistolary novel Be My Knife, the
writings of his desperate character Yair exemplify this dilemma.
Yair, in letters that read like monologues on the couch, tells of his
desperate desire to be understood and his fear that he is nothing
but a screaming baby, a braying donkey foal, an “infantile weirdo.”
He warns his epistolary lover Miriam to get back because (note the
female body imagery) “disgusting rivers are flowing out of all his
orifices . . . the shedding layers of his slightly overexcited soul . . .”
Then again he writes, “I have been the hole, how unmasculine.”
When he speaks of his longing to just once “touch the target, touch,
touch one alien soul”, he sees himself becoming the screamer, who
“screams in his breaking, reedy voice, which continues to change

throughout his life.” Tellingly, his invocation of feminine hysteria
includes identifying himself as the container, the one who has
understood this scream “not with my ears but with my stomach,
my pulse, my womb . . .” It is almost as if he is forced to be a
container, who understands others but experiences this as emascu-
lation—not unlike the gender-switching boy Coates (Coates, Fried-
man, & Wolfe, 1991) describes, whose cartoon depicts a cat
screaming because he is being forced to turn into a lady. He ought,
Yair says, to contain himself phallically: “My father would say to
me, the whole body wants to pee, but you know what to take out to
do the job.” At the book’s climax, in a power struggle with his little
son, Yair tries to claim the position of that phallic father whose
voice appeared earlier: “You will return to me, crawling, as usual,
says he dryly.” He shuts his little son—his little boy self—out of the
house (the maternal container) until he gives in. Yair finally does
require the understanding intervention of Miriam, his “good
mother-container”, to rescue him from the tormenting alternatives
of emasculated boy impotence or punitive paternal control.
Grossman’s story suggests how a boy’s sense of loss in relation
to the mother impairs his sense of containment because it is com-
pounded by the need to disidentify with both sides of the mother–
baby couple: the mother’s womb, which hears and enfolds, the
baby who cries out. Repudiation of identification with mother and
baby contaminates, as we see in Yair’s plaint, the previous identifi-
cation with the organs that signify the internal container. It is a
mark of weakness to identify with the womb that hears and recog-
nizes the cry of the child for its mother, the scream of not being
heard. Disidentification is necessitated by the threat of being belit-
tled, “castrated”, or seen as the crying, leaky baby by the father.
This disidentification can impair the integration of everything con-
solidated under the umbrella of maternal accommodating func-
tions—receptivity, holding, and responsibility for one’s own
regulation—thus leaving the little boy uncontained, over-excited
and leaky. This can only be counteracted, as his father says, by
making the penis the sole and powerful container of discharge.
Accepting this unattainable phallic ideal as a signifier of his own
lack, he feels himself humiliated, effeminized. He is cut off by his
shame—thrown into catastrophic isolation, longing but unable to
touch even one other. Thus the problem of being heard and held, having
one’s excess contained, is expressed through gender signifiers as a prob-
lem of masculine and feminine identifications.
In Grossman’s narrative we see how complex a man’s relation-
ship to cast-off femininity becomes. I have been suggesting that the
very norm of femininity was constructed to hold unwanted experi-
ences of vulnerability and helplessness, and that this occurs
through the defensive splitting of activity and passivity. This view
of the feminine corresponds to the classic image of daughter, the
one who, Freud insists, must switch to the father. Here we see the
logic of Freud’s (1931b, 1933a) insistence that this switch is what
defines femininity. Of course, Horney (1926) had already pointed
out how Freud’s theory of penis envy and the girl’s sense of
inferiority reproduced exactly the thinking of the oedipal boy. This
thinking performs a double move: the daughter as passive femi-
nine object now becomes, via a symbolic equation, a receptacle for
the self’s active discharge; also (via projective identification) she
now stands in as the sacrificial masochistic self whose sexual im-
pulse is turned inward. She will take on the role of accommodating
and absorbing unmanageable tension—like a containing mother,
only more controllable. Another feature of this move is that the
mother is split, so that her accommodating aspect is attributed to
the girl and her active organizing aspect is reformulated as male,
fatherly (“use your penis to do the job”). This active part of the
mother—for instance her anal control, often called phallic— is
what the boy identifies with and recodes as masculine. What the
boy often abjects is her sexuality, her organs: hence the disavowal
of the vagina, which Freud took to be normal.
The daughter position

The construction of femininity and the daughter position in the
“oedipal-boy mind” operate culturally, instituted and evolved
over the long history of patriarchy. How, exactly, they are created
and transmitted, I could not claim to describe, but I think we see
the residues of this process in the history of psychoanalysis and in
many common clinical appearances. I have termed this construc-
tion of femininity the “daughter position” because its transmission
is encoded in the shift to the father, the role of passive container,

caretaker, or incest victim such as we saw in the hysterical daugh-
ters of Freud’s famous cases. Culturally it functions to help consti-
tute many versions of patriarchy. But it might also be called the
“sister position” insofar as it is perceived laterally as the role of a
younger sister by the oedipal boy.
We must also recognize how the daughter position not only
serves the boy’s repudiation of mother but also often works as the
template for girls’ actual “turn to father”, allowing girls to separate
from their mothers. Here is the sense in Freud’s idea that the
complementary relation to father, rather than the identification
with mother, constitutes femininity. It is not that the girl’s identifi-
cation and love for mother are superseded, as Freud suggested in
speaking of a change of object. There has been much discussion
(Chodorow, 1976; Ogden, 1987) of the fact that such a break with
the mother is not necessary: rather, it is pathogenic. But a girl’s
sense of her relation to mother will be differently inflected when/
if the girl imagines herself or her mother to be the father’s passive
object. In many cases, the embrace of femininity seems to offer or
define a girl’s path into the world of men. Of course, as Dinnerstein
(1977) noted, the feminine escape from the maternal may turn
liberation into another form of servitude.
The feminine position can be mixed with other, contradictory
stances, which I cannot elaborate here: tomboy, rebel, seducer, and
mother’s helper. This constellation of femininity also leads to many
seemingly contradictory encodings of sexual excitement, such as
the waif-like, boyish girl who barely disguises her impersonation
of the oedipal father’s boy-self, the helpless child he used to be.
Here I am merely emphasizing how the figure of feminine daugh-
ter functions in and, in a sense, originates with imperatives of the
male psyche: to absorb the position of helpless, stimulated baby
and retain the function of the early accommodating container
mother. Unfortunately, insofar as the daughter embodies the
male’s split-off helpless sexuality, she can be overwhelmingly
stimulating to an adult man, to her own father. And so the solution
repeats the problem for the incestuously stimulated father.
But what about the girl who chooses the route of concealing her
loss and longing for mother as well as her need to please father by
adopting the role of denigrated, precociously sexualized feminine
object? Isabelle, feeling at once unloved and controlled by mother

and adoring of her unavailable father, took refuge from her mother
in her early teens by hanging out behind the skating rink, having
sex with boys. When a girl, especially one who lacks identification
with a holding mother, seeks access to men by accommodating and
pleasing, formulaic versions of “feminine masochism” appear.
Another woman, “Deirdre”, found her adolescent flight into
femininity so disturbing and shaming—so degraded in the eyes of
her father—that she was entirely unable to integrate her early
active tomboy self, developed in childhood when she was her
father’s buddy, within her adult life as a woman. She retired from
her aspirations as artist and teacher into the role of nurturing earth-
mother, giving to her children the attention her mother had always
denied her. She yielded in everything to her artist husband, who
increasingly turned to his fragile, waif-like female students for his
sexual life. Deirdre, feeling she had forfeited her own sexuality and
identity, sought analysis. Her wish to reclaim her sexuality and
compete for the prize of femininity led her into affairs with inap-
propriate, scary men. Her sense of losing herself was exacerbated
by a long period of nursing her father in his final illness.
Deirdre’s memories of her father included one defining of a

dramatic shift in their relationship from “buddy” to sexual
object. Until age ten or eleven she had been a tomboy, as daring
and adventurous as her troop of male cousins who went fishing
and hunting with her father. Suddenly one summer day her
father turned from her sharply, telling her that she was too old
to come along with the boys, and she should put on a shirt! It
was then that Deirdre shifted into her feminine persona, and
her father began to treat her as a degraded object—he would
stare at her growing breasts, making comments about their size,
but more painfully, would hike up her jeans at the waist, so that
they cut into her crotch, and demand she dance on her toes “like
a Spanish dancer.” Among the shameful memories of this time
was one in which Deirdre had allowed herself to be groped by
one of her father’s friends at a party. In treatment, Deirdre now
dreams that a sexy but dangerous man is prowling the neighbour-
hood. He comes to her door, and even though she thinks she should not,
she lets him in. As she runs away from the house, she realizes that she
must rescue the kitten hiding there. For some reason it is a calico
kitten, she says, and then realizes this refers to her father’s name,
Cal. Confused, she wonders about whether the kitten is herself
or her father. Who is it, actually, that she must take care of?
Gradually we are able to formulate the link between her un-

mothered baby self and her father’s, allied in their exclusion by
mother. She allows invasion by her father in order to create a
repaired, loving mother–baby couple in which she is the mother
of her father. We begin to explore the way she was mystified by
having absorbed all the aspects of shameful helplessness that
her father evacuated into her. This link between father and
daughter, in which the girl’s role is to mother the hidden baby
in the father alternates with the one in which the girl plays the
man’s lost child self. Along with the fear of causing harm
through sexual aggression and the traditionally noted fear of
uncovering the feminine identification as “castrated”, we also
find a version of male fantasy, which includes an identification
with the girl as the helpless child. When this identification is
urgently sexualized, it takes the form we have increasingly
recognized in cases of abuse. But there are countless less dra-
matic instances that come to our attention.
Masculinity and the struggle to get in

The identification with and over-stimulation by the passive, tanta-
lizing girl appears, for instance, in the film American Beauty, in
which the perverse father comes to see his abandoned child-self in
the girl of his obsessional dreams. In the film, Lester’s wife is
impermeable and sealed, like the shining veneer in her perfect
house. He cannot get into her mind or her body. His wish to enter
her can only appear as attacking or as messy, invasive, and disgust-
ing. Throughout the film, Lester fantasizes compulsively about the
cheerleader friend of his daughter, an intentionally tantalizing
nymph. But this irresistible stimulation shifts dramatically in the
moment when she reveals that she is actually a virgin and a
neglected child whose parents pay no attention to her. Suddenly, as
if waking from the dream, Lester recognizes that this girl is a
subject with her own centre of feeling. He finds himself needing to

feed and take care of her, as if she were the little child and he the
mother. The bright lights of over-stimulation are shut off, and
feelings of abandonment and grief bring about an identificatory
connection to the girl as person.
Lester’s recognition of himself in the girl was an unusual end-
ing for Hollywood. More commonly, the feminine role is to em-
body the unwanted, primitively feared experience of helpless
over-stimulation and make of it an exciting invitation—one that, to
the relief of both men and women, the phallus can act upon,
control, and structure. The phallic structuring is the function of the
master in Isabelle’s autoerotic fantasies, controlling what might
otherwise overwhelm the self. But this phallic role carries its own
contradictions. Discharge into the other, though ostensibly active,
also becomes reactive. For instance, early ejaculation expresses the
fear of being overwhelmed by tension, personified as the feared/
desired object. Containing his own excitement through phallic
control can be difficult for a man, and without phallic control
discharge signifies feminine weakness: leakage in the container-
self of the little boy who cannot attain the phallic control of the
father. The catastrophe of being uncontained and over-excited
becomes gendered: it signifies emasculation.
These themes were replayed in a striking way by a male patient

who identified strongly with the character of Lester. Himself an
actor, the patient believed that I did not sufficiently recognize
his aggressive and perverse character or the destructiveness of
his fantasies about women. He reacted strongly to my interpre-
tation, made in the form of a response to his comments on the
film, along the lines of what I have just stated: that in the end
Lester actually uncovered his identification with the abandoned
baby part of the girl. The patient protested, telling me that I was
a “sucker” for Hollywood endings, calling me naïve and gulli-
ble. He was far more capable than I of taking a hard look at
Lester’s character. Indeed, I found myself wondering whether I
was “soft” on aggression, afraid to confront my patient, ready
to be gulled. However, as I listened to the contempt that infused
his protestations and reminded myself that this session fell only
a week before a scheduled absence on my part, I began to reflect
on the feeling of being the one who is the needy baby. I won-
dered: was it I who cannot face the malevolence of the man—in
this case, my patient’s extremely contemptuous father who
used to deride men who were dependent upon women? I
suggested to him that in this debate we were enacting the very
matter at hand: perhaps it felt to him more masculine and
powerful to be the one who could see Lester’s depravity. At the
same time, as he persisted in identifying with a powerful
though perverse father who despises the baby in himself and
others, he could ensure that I be that baby. I would be the one
who was in the position of the baby, the “sucker” who still
needs a mother, who is dependent and gullible. He, with his
hard clarity, surely did not need me to be his mother, did not
feel abandoned; instead, he could impress me with his mascu-
linity. Keeping at bay his feelings of loss and helplessness about
my impending absence, he could impress me with his “bad
boy” aspects of independence and transgression.
Despite the availability of women to play the passive part, mascu-

linity shaped around repudiation of dependency and fear of pas-
sivity is always threatened. And while the objectified body of the
girl can take up the experience of helplessness and so become
passivized, as Grossman illustrates and as Brennan (1992) has
argued, Daddy’s boy can also figure as passive container for excess,
being fixed in the position of mirroring and providing attention to
stabilize the father. Mother as well as father can occupy the domi-
nance position, using the child of either sex in this way. Isabelle
became a container for her mother’s excess, whose voice she was
able to identify as the master. Yair became the despised weakling
subject to his father’s contempt. Thus we are well reminded by
Freud to regard masculinity and femininity as positions that can be
assumed or fled by men or women. The constellation I have ana-
lysed here shows the identity known as masculinity to be associ-
ated with the position of defensive activity, dumping anxiety,
mastering stimuli, and creating the abjected, containing other
while the position of femininity is to be that accommodating,
receiving and mirroring other.
However, these positions, as Freud’s contradictory statements
show him struggling to articulate, are not the whole story about
activity and passivity. Too often, though, Freud’s work seemed to

take defensive activity and helpless passivity as the necessary
forms of those trends. Too often his schema—as I (Benjamin, 1998a,
1998b) have said elsewhere—misses the dimension of pleasurable
receptivity and makes it seem that the position of receiving stimu-
lation, holding tension, or directing it inward is necessarily
unpleasure, and that the pleasurable thing is to expel tension,
evacuate through discharge, rather than take it in. Unconsciously
this view assumes that tension is experienced only as excess, that it
will not or cannot be mentalized, recognized, and mutually held in
an intersubjective relation. Such a viewpoint correlates, I suspect,
with a traumatic experience of passivity as the condition of help-
lessness in the face of impingement, seduction, or abandonment.
Trauma, I propose, is indeed the hidden, unrecognized face of the
masculine defence against passivity (see below).
Re-visioning gender, reformulating passivity

My aim here is to suggest that when we reformulate our under-
standing of gender positions, we will see that they have arisen as
an attempt to solve the problem of excess. To challenge these
positions is to challenge that human beings cannot otherwise man-
age tension. So, on the one hand, we could say that the masculine–
feminine polarity has served important functions in managing
excess, but also that psychoanalysis is continually exposing how it
fails: how it arises through splitting, how much suffering and pain
and internal contradiction such defences generate. Thus questions
are raised that I can only mention here: for instance, regarding
psychoanalytic assumptions about the necessary role of repudiat-
ing femininity or disidentifying from mother in male develop-
ment.1 Such questions, I am arguing, are seen differently when we
consider management of tension and individual self-regulation of
arousal and affect to depend on the intersubjective context of
mutual regulation and recognition.
I have already suggested that the intersubjective economy re-
quires a concept of ownership, which we arrive at through a self-
conscious reversal that reclaims the feminine or maternal functions
of containing and having an inside. Holding, traditionally ascribed
to maternal or feminine selves, and ownership must be recouped

and taken into our psychoanalytic notion of the sexual subject. A
subject who owns passivity, with its pleasure and vulnerability,
need not passivize the other. Such a subject can have desire for
another subject without reducing the latter to a will-less or over-
whelming object who, in turn, renders the former helpless before
his/her own impulses. Insofar as being a subject is conflated with
the grabby, defensively active Apollonian sexuality, it is no subject
at all. As we have seen, the common flip-side of phallic control is a
version of male sexuality as uncontained, controlled by the object,
lacking ownership of desire. In one such version, sexual excitement
takes on a dissociative cast, as the subject declares that the object is
so compelling and tantalizing that he cannot even remember, let
alone be responsible for, his action—a spectacle that unfortunately
occupied much prime time in the United States during the Clinton–
Lewinsky affair. Agency, or activity, dissolves as the object be-
comes the doer/actor, the subject the done to/acted upon. The
experience “I desire you”, in which the subject owns desire, must
be distinguished from “you are so desirable”—and certainly from
being overpowered by the object of compulsion. This is not to say
that the fantasy “you are so attractive and so overpowering that I
cannot contain myself, just the sight of you can drive me wild”
cannot be enjoyable within a mutual relationship. But the mutual
enjoyment of fantasy is predicated on owning of desire, holding
excitement inside the body—a capacity often debased precisely by
its conflation with the feminine passive receptacle. To own one’s
own feelings while receiving an other is possible simultaneously.
Ownership implies a notion of sustaining tension rather than
eliminating it—holding over discharge, surrender rather than
mastery. It is not necessarily the same as “containing” a feeling for
the other, which one may do without owning it in oneself. It
develops within an energetic economy in which self-regulating
action and mutual regulation are synchronized in a matrix of
recognition (“just once, hitting the target, touching an alien soul”,
as Grossman’s Yair pleads). In this economy subject-to-subject
recognition makes tension a source of pleasure. It is possible to
play with complementarity and discharge without holding to rig-
idly fixed gender positions. It is possible to bear excitement and
feeling in the sense of receiving, witnessing, and holding without
“doing” anything—a different experience of passivity. In the co-

creating mutuality of union, both partners are receiving each other
as well as transmitting.
In addition, when we are able to alternate freely between com-
plementary positions such as activity and passivity, when we can
move in and out of symmetrical positions, we are relying on an
orientation to a third, to a dance jointly created or recognized
(Benjamin, 1999; 2002). This orientation to the third changes the
relational pattern. One formulation of this third position in relation
to activity and passivity offered by the relational analyst
Emmanuel Ghent (1990) is the idea of surrender. It denotes a form
of letting go of mastery and control that allows us to transcend the
terms of dominance and submission, a letting go in which the
person does not give over to the other—although perhaps with the
other. Ghent suggested that submission was a look-alike, a per-
verse form of surrender—in effect, we could say that giving over to
the other is the form taken by longing for giving over to the
interaction in the presence of the other. Submission and domina-
tion are the forms recognition assumes when only the twoness of
complementarity is available.
Trauma, surrender, and the third

I will suggest that in the space of thirdness, when excess is differ-
ently held and processed, what we call passivity can be refigured
as surrender. In the re-appropriation of passivity, the internal
experience changes from submitting to a complementary other
towards surrendering to a process of exploration and recognition.
This process transcends gender role reversal, although it may
include it, as we shall see.
What happens when the potentially traumatic experience of
passivity is held, enjoyed, represented because it is experienced as
surrender not to the other but to the process itself, to a third? How
would the renewed integration of what we have called passivity
change our imagining of sexual subjectivity? I have suggested that
there is a space in which the reversal of the active/passive
complementarity takes us out of the power relation and into the
surrender to a process of mutual recognition.
This surrender can be distinguished from what appears as or is

labelled as passivity but is actually a feature of such traumatic
experience with isolation or excessive stimulation. The attempt to
bind, master, and represent such traumatic experiences has shaped
our images of masculinity and femininity. In erotic life, as in
analysis, when we open ourselves to the sexual fantasies and
feelings surrounding these images, as we uncover their traumatic
depths and edges, we come to see mutual recognition not as the
erasure of such experience but the possibility of its expression and
communication. Thus Grossman’s Yair reveals his hole, his don-
key-foal self, when he tries to reach out and transcend the damage
of shame that has left the self in desperate isolation. His screams
and cracks and holes, with their sexual connotations, already incor-
porate abraded longings for recognition that can only be reclaimed
in a different relation to the other. His epistolary love-letter
“therapy” seeks to use the erotic as a site of reparation.
Returning to the analysis of excess and its relation to passivity,
we can see how the erotic can become therapeutic when trauma,
passivity, and psychic pain are integrated in the relation between
self and other. The film theorist Katja Silverman (1990) has offered
an interesting illustration of this issue. She was pursuing the ques-
tion of what happens when defences are stripped by trauma, when
phallic masculinity fails to protect men and women from the in-
sinuation of death. Silverman, trained in literary criticism, takes up
the notion of trauma as it appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(Freud, 1920g) and uses it to discuss the collapse of phallic mascu-
linity in films about the Second World War, as exemplified by The
Best Years of Our Lives. As you recall, Freud portrays the protection
from trauma as provided by an internal shield, a psycho-physi-
ological barrier, rather than by another person(s). For Silverman,
the idea of this protective shield becomes a metaphor associated
with masculine armour and phallic self-holding. She compares its
breakdown with the breakdown of the organizing gender con-
structs, the dominant fictions. The film portrays a double trauma:
the individual men returning from the war have suffered trauma
or shock, and the cultural schema of masculinity did not protect
them. The fabric of the “phallic fiction” was torn, failed them. They
lack any collective representation of suffering to enfold them.
The film shows how their wounding and symbolic castration

results in a kind of gender reversal, in which women now gaze
upon the spectacle of male lack. This spectacle is erotized, but not
as humiliation or fetishistic denial. Without a fetish to embody and
displace the wounding, the film nonetheless depicts the sexual
excitement of this role reversal. As the woman undresses the vet-
eran Harold Russell who actually lost his arms, his hooks now
removed, she is aroused and will make love to him. The ex-pilot
who suffers flashbacks and nightmares exchanges a gaze of mutual
recognition with the woman who gazes on the scene of his social
displacement.
Silverman cites a contemporary critic of the film who said that it
showed that now the man could be passive without guilt, that the
film is a “projection” of the “familiar Hollywood (and American)
dream of male passivity.” Apparently the critic failed to note that a
woman might enjoy activity without guilt—not a dream but a real
possibility. We might, rather, think that the scene of gender re-
versal seems to derive its erotic charge from an intersubjective
process. The recognition of pain and vulnerability, the wound to
the phallic version of masculinity, offers a release: a letting go of
the destructive illusion of the phallic contract, which prescribes
stoic loneliness and denial. In the film, as the couple face the abyss
of breakdown together, they break the circuit of defensive activity
and perverse passivity. The sign of the wound functions as the
opposite of a fetish, it signifies the possibility of overcoming disa-
vowal, representing vulnerability, witnessing pain and suffering—
the intersubjective moment of surrender.
The film suggests a vision of trauma transformed into a thera-
peutic erotics of recognition, the energy of which derives not
merely from reversing the old gender opposition, but from re-
claiming what it sacrificed. Eros begins with mourning the loss of
the intact body and the ideal of manhood, to which so much has
been sacrificed. It is mourning in the presence of an other, a
depressive solution, accepting passivity, loss, and death. Break-
down of the phallic fiction opens fissures in what would otherwise
remain the seamless wall of repetition. It becomes possible to
witness suffering and thereby bear mourning, to own desire and
enjoy passivity.
In this way loss itself, shared and represented, becomes a third

to which the couple surrender, and in this surrender find a tran-
scendence of suffering. We might say that accepting passivity in
the process of intersubjective surrender forms a crucial element of
what has been conceptualized as the depressive position. Passivity
is recouped and transformed into an experience of surrender, of
vulnerability in a therapeutic relationship. The very distinction
between passivity and surrender only becomes possible when fear
of passivity is lifted. This, in turn, depends on the joint creation of
interpersonal safety, each person’s gift to the other of a holding
presence and an understanding witness, which ensures that vul-
nerability will not plunge us into traumatic excess. But this can
occur only through awareness that strength derives not from de-
nial but from acknowledging helplessness, damage, and the over-
whelming of the psyche by suffering.
This vision is significant for our larger understanding of what is
therapeutic and transformational in erotic life. The integration of
passivity in surrender to an erotic third—the dance of love—allows
us to metaphorize psychic pain rather than act it out through a
sadomasochistic complementarity. When erotic partners can tran-
scend the fixed positions of gender complementarity, when passiv-
ity becomes an experience to be borne and integrated by both
sexes, gender conventions no longer need be used defensively.
Rather, they can become conventions of play, forms of expression.
In this space of thirdness desire can flow through the circuits of
pain and passivity, creating a new opening for the energetic ex-
change between self and other.
NOTES
1. It has largely been accepted that the disidentification with mother is
necessary to constitute a masculine subject. But, as we explore the effects of
traditional forms taken by the boy’s disidentification, we may reconsider: does
this take place as early as Greenson (1968) suggested, and is such sharp
disidentification pathogenic rather than essential (Benjamin, 1996; Corbett,
1996)? Elsewhere I have argued, along with Aron (1995), Bassin (1996), and
May (1986), that renunciation of identifications with sexual organs and behav-
iours attributed to the other sex (such as Fast, 1984, proposed) is not necessary
to consolidate one’s own identity. Nor does it even necessarily provide a good
basis for integrating sexual subjectivity and activity. Rather, sexual subjectivity
is enhanced by identification with the other’s bodily experience. Indeed, the
capacity to hold in tension rather than splitting complementary aims and
attitudes—the capacity for what I have called post-conventional gender
complementarity—allows us to play with and treat as metaphors the bodily
concretes of sexual roles. Lacking this development beyond oedipal repudia-
tion of the passive “feminine” side of the gender, complementarity lays the
basis for anxiety about sexual union, with its ability to evoke repressed
longings for merger and surrender. Contrary to common wisdom about mas-
culinity, a more positive identification with a holding mother or with bodily
receptivity can often diminish male heterosexual anxiety.
NOTE
An earlier versions of this chapter was presented at the Fiftieth-Anniversary
Conference of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung Tagung, Frankfurt,
November 2000.
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CHAPTER TEN
The economy of freedom
Gisela Kaplan
F
or the better part of two decades Jessica Benjamin has used
psychoanalysis and her own creative impulses to theoreti-
cally explore the depth of the human psyche. She has per-
haps given more emphasis to the affective domain than other
writers, and one of her contributions to the ongoing debate is her
development of the notion of intersubjectivity and the intersub-
jective moment. When a subjective position of self is surrendered to
another only those two people alone know their situation in a
manner no one else can. In the process, “thirdness” is created, as
explained in Shadow of the Other, as a communicative relationship,
and as a way of recognizing difference and tensions between self
and another. In her chapter, Jessica Benjamin places before the
audience a proposal on how one can intellectually and emotionally
transform the dynamics of intrapsychic events (one-person econ-
omy, as per Freud) into a two-person economy. As I read her text,
the notion of a seesaw comes to mind as an image of an interde-
pendence that will make one or the other respond to each other’s
emotional states. I come back to this later.
Apart from her obvious address to an audience of professional
psychoanalysts, her chapter is also firmly anchored in a particular
173
174 GISELA KAPLAN
strand of social theory tradition, and I want to offer some com-

ments arising from these linkages.
My first point is that the tensions and possibilities she describes
in two persons is theoretically based on the notion of the dialectic,
of a dynamic that is neither circular nor linear, that creates spirals
rather than fields, tensions and surrender rather than opposites,
and movements rather than structural dyads. This is consistent
with her earlier work. In 1995, Jessica Benjamin argued that if we
think of sex and gender as oriented to the pull of opposing poles,
then these poles are not masculinity and femininity. “Rather, gen-
der dimorphism itself represents only one pole, the other pole
being the polymorphism of all individuals” (Benjamin, 1995, p.
141). In today’s sometimes theoretically impoverished world, a
theoretical position that is based on relational and dialectical mod-
els of thought gives credence to the view that the complexities of
human emotions and actions are not entirely irrelevant to human
existence. It is manifestly a hope that we continue to see the vast
array of experiences, and of human interaction with its environ-
ment (Oyama, 1985, expands on such interactions) and consider
these worthy of exploration; and that we do so despite a climate of
beliefs that argues for simple linear and often genetic explanations
of personalities and behaviour (Rose & Rose, 2000).
Whether in the theoretical domain or in the applied fields of
exploring the human psyche or, indeed, in everyday life, we ought
to remain aware that we are not just responding to stimuli but often
also altering the stimuli by our interactions with them; in conse-
quence, we engage in dynamic exchanges that lead us to places
where we have not been before. One of the few recent studies that
have investigated this complex interplay between the sexes in
some detail was concerned with human attractiveness. The study
found that people who think of themselves as attractive opt for a
partner who is more attractive in their own perception than they
would have chosen otherwise. The study asked each group to rank
another group according to a scale of attractiveness (Kowner,
1994). They were then given bogus feedback that they were
ranked top in attractiveness by the group and asked to make their
final choice. Immediately, they aimed for a different and—in their
judgement—more attractive person. One important finding by
Kowner is the dialectic approach to a particular stimulus. The
THE ECONOMY OF FREEDOM 175
stimulus (another human as being a potential partner) is not just

one to whom one responds statically as in a simple stimulus–
response pair. As we have argued elsewhere (Kaplan & Rogers,
2003), there is a process involved in terms of an evaluation of its
intrinsic properties (an attractive male or female), but first it is
processed according to how the observer’s intrinsic qualities rank
with respect to the other, and only after that initial assessment is
the judgement of attractiveness announced. Hence, the observer
makes a judgement on the basis of how likely it is that access to the
other will be possible and thus makes the preferred choice (and the
ranking of the other) according to self-assessment.
This example has some bearing on the second point I wish to
raise in response to Benjamin’s chapter. A key to Benjamin’s expo-
sition is the concept of desire. And here we suddenly find a tradi-
tion emerging that Benjamin may fight against but yet stays within.
Males, so Freud believed, lack desire because they discharge and
expel tensions, and this is uncontained and controlled by the object.
If desire is to be felt, tensions must be held in order to create desire.
Benjamin works with these concepts and changes them. However,
one still feels bound by a powerful tradition, as is explained below.
In traditional philosophy—and also in legal structures—the
relationship between men and women resembles more closely an
ideal of female subordination modelled on a master–slave relation-
ship, than it does a mere contractual inequality, as so many femi-
nist scholars have found. In studies on slavery, and on women, two
words have been used regularly: exploitation and power. One
important conceptual addition is sexuality. It is a third dimension
in which exploitation and power are played out in more complex,
at times interdependent, and often ambivalent ways. A slave could
be but a slave, but similar power differentials when applied be-
tween men and women may be tempered or heightened by sexual
relations. Even in the worst bonds—and then against the will of the
actors—desire, dependence, and passion may be mingled in a brew
of contempt, subjugation, and despair. Love is rarely a component
of either slavery or exploitative sexual relationships, but power is
its axiom. Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality (1978), we know that freedom from oppression and, much
more deep-seated, from repression may not be just a matter of
lifting a few prohibitions. Sexuality, he argued, does not exist
176 GISELA KAPLAN
beyond power relations and is not controlled by centralized power.

It is actually produced by those power relations that both repress
and saturate it. Foucault’s famous dictum is “Power is everywhere;
not because it embraces everything but because it comes from
everywhere” (p. 93). “Everywhere”, he would presumably agree, is
male-defined. Hence, Benjamin’s explorations of desire and sur-
render, seen as two corner-stones of emotional states between two
people that may lead to the subjective moment and to actual
communication (thus to a relinquishing of power and control), are
contradictory and provide a strange twist to the Western tradi-
tional notion of the feminine as the domain of affectivity and desire
and the masculine of reason.
Coming back to the study of attractiveness, I can now make
another point in which the concept of desire (a concept that also
appears to have been a favourite in much post-structural writing of
the last decade) is modified by the social. The applied study of
attractiveness raised before highlights that the social domain is a
creator of desire as much as the self. Deborah Britzman argued
recently that the self becomes a problem of desiring a self and
hence is in need of a social. She continues:
Identification allows the self-recognition and mis-recognition.
And through identification desire is made. But because identi-
fication is a partial, contradictory, and ambivalent relation with
aspects of objects or dynamics of others, it may be thought of as
a means to make and direct desire. Many positionings are
possible: identification of, identification with, identification
against, over-identification, and so on. [Britzman, 1998, p. 82]
The question, then, arises whether the creation of desire (the hold-
ing of tension) or its discharge is not also a question of identifica-
tion (of self or mis-recognition). The citing of Katja Silverman’s film
The Best Years of Our Lives in Benjamin’s chapter is very appropriate
in this context, but we may ask how we interpret the intersub-
jective moment in the context of identification and self-recognition.
Heinrich Heine once wrote a brief but poignant poem:
Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch.
Nur da wir im Kot uns fanden,
Da verstanden wir uns gleich.
[Rarely have you understood me,

rarely did I understand you,
But thrown together in the gutter (sewer),
we swiftly understood each other.]
It is possible to interpret Silverman’s film in terms of negative
conclusions rather than of a liberatory intersubjective moment that
may have been created amidst misery.
And this brings me to my third point. In my reading of Jessica
Benjamin’s chapter, her tone seems to me to reflect a very deep
cultural pessimism. The darkness of mood may well fit our times,
and the citation of various dark films has not helped to lighten the
burden that, one feels, has descended upon us. Although the sub-
tleties of intersubjective moments provide interludes of under-
standing, it may be worth remembering that such moments can
also be created in conversations with convicted felons on death
row. Perhaps we live in an age when pessimism does—and even
should—hold pride of place, but it is not a mood to which I can
subscribe. More importantly, its expression in Benjamin’s chapter
suggests a path of therapy that is, in fact, not depressive but
depressing.
To exemplify this point, Benjamin interprets Silverman’s explo-
ration of a relationship by saying:
Eros begins with mourning the loss of the intact body. . . It is
mourning in the presence of an other, a depressive solution,
accepting passivity, loss, and death. . . . It becomes possible to
witness suffering and thereby bear mourning, to own desire
and enjoy passivity. [p. 167 herein]
The gendered positions are emphasized, forcing a different psy-

chological solution to precede the emergence of Eros.
On the subject of Eros, there are three rather immediate re-
sponses that can be made. In Benjamin’s chapter, Eros reads very
much like a possibility, but one that is shadowy and belongs to the
graveyard, to the night, to dark corners of our minds and souls. It
is perhaps culturally not surprising that, in Benjamin’s chapter, as
in Silverman’s film, Eros is linked to surrender, death, loss, and
mourning. The other response that is elicited here is my acknowl-
edgment that Eros may well be the most taboo area of sexuality and
emotional states in Western modern times. Indeed, the new lan-
178 GISELA KAPLAN
guage of evolutionary psychology has done away with Eros alto-

gether by choosing to adopt a discourse of economics that speaks
about desires and feelings in terms of costs, benefits, investments,
and the like (Buss, 1994). My third query is that, in Benjamin’s
chapter, we find Eros in a sense as a product of tensions of male-
ness and femaleness, and one may well query this implied dynam-
ics.
Frankly, Eros need not have anything to do with complemen-
tarity or with male and female, masculinity or femininity. Eros may
involve subtleties of communication that may or may not be sexual
at all (or even lead in that direction). One of the simplest and most
powerful cinematographic vignettes of such expressions of “Eros”
was shown in John Hurt’s performance in The Naked Civil Servant.
The much-maligned and abused homosexual with an exaggerated
make-up meets a group of sailors at night and, in this brief scene,
they keep walking around him, smiling and relaxed, and he glows
with quiet joy because he knows that “nothing was going to hap-
pen”. A fleeting moment of happiness, of suspension from social
condemnation, and Eros can unfold its most attractive side: a
lightness of being.
Eros is almost the antithesis of reproduction because it exists for
and in itself, without visible gain or purpose. Eros is fragile and
pleasurable, but I doubt very much whether such mood depends
on withholding stronger emotions and desires. It is a thorny path to
travel even to arrive just at some agreeable basic definition, let
alone one that can be operationalized—particularly in the absence
of cultural support for Eros.
The suggestion, however, to attribute some assumed hetero-
sexuality to the blossoms of Eros may be still more problematic
(although I am not entirely certain whether this is a fair comment,
judging by Benjamin’s previous work). Still, in case such an inter-
pretation is not all too far-fetched, I feel that one needs to be
reminded of arguments as old as the early part of the last century:
Ralph Linton, in his classic The Study of Man (1936), argued that
culture determines the perception of biological (and psychological)
differences, not the other way around. It is not a new idea to claim
the historicity of psychology and of masculinity and femininity as
vital parts of cultural perceptions and cultural constructs at a given
time. Indeed, psychic, erotic, and sexual energies may be present
without having to resort to parameters akin to the masculine and

feminine.
Let me exemplify this further by reference to a very influential
eleventh-century Islamic scholar, Imam Ghazali. His philosophy
exposes the polarization of human sexuality into two kinds—femi-
nine and masculine—as a Western idea. According to this early
Muslim view, culture is not created by sublimation: only an emo-
tionally and sexually fulfilled person is likely to be able to make a
cultural contribution. Virtue arises from a discharge of tensions,
and culture springs from the satisfaction (hence not the sublima-
tion) of the sexual drive. Of course, that idea of discharge is, to
some extent, also acknowledged in Western intellectual traditions
(and in Benjamin’s chapter), but it is accorded only to the male and,
as such, problematized. In some Muslim thought from Ghazali
onwards, females, too, “discharge tension” and are sexually per-
ceived as having ejaculations (Mernissi, 2002).
Gender organization of sexuality is not a new topic, but it is a
relatively recent phenomenon (cf. Rubin, 1984), at least in Western
cultures, that sexuality and gender have finally been analytically
separated and discussed as separate, albeit reinforcing, concepts
(Nakano, 1999). One is reminded here of Dorothy Dinnerstein’s
remark that the sexual realm is “a wildlife preserve in the civilized
word, a refuge within which inarticulate, undomesticated private
creative initiative is protected from extinction” (cited in Williams &
Stein, 2002, p. 18).
* * *
Finally, at the beginning of this chapter I raised the possibility
that Benjamin’s two-person economy, while a significant extension
of previous ideas, creating literally a third space (the intersub-
jective moment), is still dependent on a field of tensions between
the two gendered players or emotional states. One is contingent
on the other, and in this field there is no escape, no individual
“breaking out”. It is a seesaw from which, as I read her chapter,
one ultimately cannot descend. My response was to look for an es-
cape hatch, for freedom, for growth, for exploration which, in
Benjamin’s seemingly pessimistic cultural explicative, I cannot
find. One is missing some clue to a sense of hope and strength. My
question is whether one cannot think with Martin Buber (1958) that
180 GISELA KAPLAN
relationships can go into nothingness, charting new territories and

unknown fields.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, J. (1988). The Shadow of the Other. New York: Pantheon.
Benjamin, J. (1995). Sameness and difference: “Overinclusive” model
gender development. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 15: 125–142.
Britzman, D. (1998). Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. State University of
New York Press, Albany.
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. New York: Scribners.
Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies for Human Mating.
New York: Basic Books.
Foucault, M. (1978). A History of Sexuality (trans. R. Hurley). New
York: Pantheon.
Kaplan, G., & Rogers, L. J. (2003). Gene Worship. Moving Beyond the
Nature/Nurture Debate over Genes, Brain and Gender. New York:
Other Press.
Kowner, R. (1994). The effect of physical attractiveness comparison on
choice of partners. The Journal of Social Psychology, 135 (2): 153–165.
Linton, R. (1936). The Study of Man. An Introduction. New York:
Appleton-Century.
Mernissi, F. (2002). The Muslim concept of active female sexuality. In:
C. Williams & A. Stein (Eds.), Sexuality and Gender (pp. 296–307).
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Nakano, G. E. (1999). The social construction and institutionalisation
of gender and race: An integrative framework. In: M. M. Ferree, J.
Lorber, & B. B. Hess (Eds.), Revisioning Gender (pp. 3–43). Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Oyama, S. (1985). The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems
and Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, H., & Rose, S. (Eds.) (2000). Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against
Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Harmony Books.
Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex. In: C. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (pp. 267–319). Boston: Routledge.
Williams, C., & Stein, A. (Eds.) (2002). Sexuality and Gender. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Beyond sexual difference:

clinical individuality and same-sex
cross-generation relations in the
creation of feminine and masculine
Nancy J. Chodorow
I
n this chapter, I want to reflect upon how our theoretical
thinking about the psychology of the sexes—whether we call
this maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, the
problem of gender, or the problem of sex—has been limited by
viewing the problem through the lens of sexual difference. The
sexual difference perspective has been (over)determined by the
way Freud initially posed the problem. It was selected especially
by Lacan as the Freudian view,1 and it has been taken up in the
recent rethinking of female psychology or femininity (there has
been little rethinking of male psychology or masculinity) more by
European and Latin American than by North American psycho-
analysts. These psychoanalysts thus accept many of the Lacanian
assumptions, whether or not they consider themselves Lacanian.
The sexual difference perspective also characterizes much Euro-
pean and North American feminism, whether psychoanalytic or
post-structuralist. I do not think that the specific observations I
bring to bear in what follows are new; rather, I am trying to use
these observations, that I and others have made, to locate a prob-
lem and frame a position.
181
182 NANCY J . CHODOROW
The sexual difference position takes as given that the sexes can
only be and also are psychologically defined one in relation to the
other, that male only gains meaning in relation to female, mascu-
line in relation to feminine. It has both psychoanalytic and non-
psychoanalytic roots. From Freud, it locates femininity and
masculinity in relation to the external genitals and to genital–
oedipal levels of development, deriving specifically from Freud’s
focus on genital difference—the presence or absence of the penis—
as the criterial experience in the boy’s and the girl’s development.
The observation of genital difference, Freud suggests, leads to
castration anxiety/penis envy as determinative and central to the
psychology of the sexes and sexuality throughout life, and to
presence/absence of the penis (castration fear or castration already
accomplished) as generative of the boy’s versus the girl’s entrance
into and resolution of the Oedipus complex, differential superego
development, and so forth. This is familiar territory that does not
need elaborating.
Both Lacan and post-structuralism presuppose this Freudian
psychoanalytic basis even as they move it from the realm of
anatomy into the realm of fantasy. However, their formulation of
this way of seeing sex/gender comes not only from Freud but,
equally, from a common rooting in Saussurean structuralist lin-
guistics and the closely related Lévi-Straussian structuralist an-
thropology. In these latter theories, that underlie or have been
interlocutors for Lacan and post-structuralism, meaning never in-
heres in a term itself but only in the relation it has to other terms.2
Thus, by fiat masculine can only gain fantasy meaning in relation to
feminine, and male in relation to female. This linguistic–cultural
theory is read back into psychology.
Following its proponents, I am calling this the “sexual differ-
ence” perspective, though it could equally be called, for my pur-
poses, the “gender difference” perspective.3 What is at issue for me
is not whether we use the term sex or gender, or whether “sex”
refers to the biological, unconscious fantasy, or sexuality, while
“gender” refers to the preconscious or the sociocultural. What is at
issue is whether, psychologically, in clinical and developmental
lived experience—in the realms of unconscious fantasy, transfer-
ence, the internal world, and affects—masculine and feminine, or
maleness and femaleness, must always be paired terms in which
BEYOND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE 183
the dominant or exclusive meaning of one is in relation to the

other. Although it is not relevant to my considerations here, I
myself find the term “gender” useful in helping us to distinguish
between sexed or gendered self—the senses of femaleness and
maleness,4 or femininity and masculinity—and object choice, and
in problematizing what is sometimes seen as a necessary linkage
between these. As Freud puts it, “the choice of object on the one
hand, and . . . the sexual characteristics and sexual attitude of the
subject on the other, as though the answer to the former necessarily
involved the answers to the latter” (1920a, p. 170). My inquiry takes
us to our clinical consulting-rooms and thereby also to a reconsid-
eration of how Freud posed the problem of difference in the first
place.
In what follows, I suggest that if we begin from the clinical—
from our experience and observation instead of from theoretical
fiat or an a priori, unquestioned reliance on Freud—and from there
we try to understand how individuals experience and construct
their subjective gender and sexuality, then we find that sexual
difference—the contrastive set male–female, or masculine/femi-
nine—while it may certainly be a central part of the picture, is not
more basic or more universally organizing than several other pos-
sible psychological configurations.5 In building my account, I first
describe the constitutive components to femininity and masculin-
ity that take these well beyond sexual difference. Secondly, I sug-
gest that the sexual difference perspective ignores clinical
individuality—the unique ways that individuals put together the
various ingredients that go into their gender and sexuality. We can
only know in the individual case how a particular person will put
these components together. Finally, within this account of the
constitutive components of sex/gender and of clinical individual-
ity, I extract out and elaborate upon my clinical observation that
same-sex, cross-generation relations and comparison are often as
central to or—depending on the individual case—more central to
the creation, definition, and experience of psychological sex than
sexual difference, feminine/masculine, presence or absence of the
penis. Insofar as we theorize difference, then, I would claim that on
a theoretical level, femininity defines itself as much through
woman–girl as through male–female, and that masculinity defines
itself as much through man/boy as through male–female.
It is not surprising that I am sceptical of the sexual difference

perspective, since my thinking has in some ways from the begin-
ning indirectly implied an alternative stance. “Family Structure and
Feminine Personality” (Chodorow, 1974) and The Reproduction of
Mothering (Chodorow, 1978) begin their study of the psychology of
women (and the contrastive psychology of men) from the internal
object-relational world, especially the mother–daughter (or
mother–son) constellation within that world, rather than from
Freud’s focus on the genital distinction and its sequelae. I am led via
a rereading of classical writings by Lampl-de Groot, Freud, Mack
Brunswick, Deutsch, and others to an analysis of the development
of maternality and mothering as fundamental to femininity, to a
focus on pre-oedipal components within this femininity, and to an
emphasis on the female Oedipus complex (a possible gender oxy-
moron that several have critiqued) as also a mother–daughter affair,
in which heterosexual, oedipal, father–daughter components cer-
tainly play a part but are by no means exclusive.6 My work, of
course, is partly reactive: I both take for granted as already suffi-
ciently demonstrated, and thus I also minimize, male–female, fa-
ther–daughter elements in female development and psychology.
As others pointed out over the years, and as I myself acknowl-
edged (Chodorow, 1999c), psychoanalytic feminist thinking in the
early and mid 1970s was overly leery and critical of any acknowl-
edgement of the psychic role of biology and anatomy (which par-
tially accounts for so many feminists’ attraction to Lacanian
psychoanalysis in the first place, in addition to Lacan’s overlap, via
text and language, with the feminist humanities).7 Like most subse-
quent American commentators, I acknowledge the potential role of
penis envy in female development, but I am critical of the view that
penis envy is either universal or the driving force in female psy-
chology and development, including in girls’ and women’s desires
for babies. The mother–daughter dynamics I describe, rooted as
they are in the pre-oedipal, would have led to a focus on “pregeni-
tal” as well as “genital” components of femininity, as well as to an
elaboration of reproductive female sexuality and drives. In this
sense (if I had not been critical of anatomical determinism in the
first place), my recognition of the demands of genital anatomy
would probably have led me more in the direction of “primary
femininity” theorists like Horney and Kestenberg. (Though the
term was, I believe, first used by Stoller in 1976, the widespread

and current usage of the concept of primary femininity comes after
the 1970s period of which I am writing here.)
In “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspec-
tive” (Chodorow, 1979), I take a more explicit stance, arguing that
the sexual difference perspective derives from a more typically
masculine than feminine consciousness, one that needs to separate
male from female and see the two as radically non-overlapping. I
was at the time only beginning to be familiar with either Lacanian
feminism or its French feminist detractors, like Irigaray, Kristeva,
and Cixous, who emphasized a female bodily-linguistic perspec-
tive on difference, and I was not yet a clinician, but I argued that a
strong emphasis on difference, whether it be the self–other distinc-
tion or male–female difference, was a defensive theory borne of
psychological conflict. Circling back on my female-centred devel-
opmental theory, I claimed that the conflicts that required an
emphasis on difference—whether difference inherent in a view of
separation–individuation that stressed differentiation and differ-
ence over continuing but changing connection, or in a view that
saw gender mainly in terms of sexual difference, masculine as not-
feminine—were characteristically male. Indeed, the sexual differ-
ence perspective itself (even in primary femininity or women’s
voice and body theorists!) already had a psychologically masculine
rather than a gender-neutral cast to it.
My early implicit and explicit difficulty with the sexual differ-
ence perspective came through my reading and interpretation of
psychoanalytic texts, as I tried to understand and theorize feminin-
ity and masculinity. Clinical experience expanded and grounded
my views. I have suggested (Chodorow, 1996, 1999b, 2003b) that
we can best see lived intrapsychic gender and sexuality as com-
posed of a number of constitutive ingredients, or components.
These are on one level of abstraction universals, in that each per-
son, developmentally and in their psychic experience and organi-
zation, brings a clinically individual rendition of these components
to their gender and sexuality, but they are only lived in clinically
specific combinations. In any individual, they are inextricably in-
tertwined one with the other in a way that gives that individual his
or her own particular experience. I am trying theoretically to
render what I have discovered clinically and to avoid what I think
is a problematic overgeneralizing and universalizing, on an inap-

propriate level of concreteness, in much of our theorizing about
gender and sexual difference. For example, we are taught that
“the” Oedipus complex is universal, or that all children pass
through the stages of psychosexual development that Freud first
described. But although we can find many boys (or former boys,
now our adult patients) with the “fateful” combination of love for
the mother and hatred for the father as a rival, for example, we do
not know much about any of these boys or men unless we know the
particularity of their particular love and their particular rivalry,
and how these intermesh with their opposites—love for the father
and hatred for the mother—and how these change and changed
day to day, in particular manifestations. We learn about these
particularities, not the generality Oedipus, from transferences and
reconstructions, and we no longer read (or we are sceptical when
we do read) in any case report that “the patient’s oedipal fantasies
were analysed and resolved.” And we find that for one man “oedi-
pal” fantasies are a driving force in his psychology, whether in the
area of work or of love, and they are major themes in the transfer-
ence, whereas for another such fantasies come up now and again.
We also know that boys becoming gay typically bring a set of
desires and fantasies to their oedipal love and rivalry that is differ-
ent from that of boys who are on the way to heterosexuality
(Corbett, 1993, Isay, 1989).
Similarly, to say that each child goes through an oral phase, or
an early Oedipus conflict, or has unconscious fantasies about the
mother’s breast or insides, does not tell us about the particularity of
an individual’s oral phase or early fantasies about the mother’s
breasts or insides or the particular constructions of self and object
that these produce through projective and introjective identifica-
tions. To take my own work, The Reproduction of Mothering suggests
that mother–daughter dynamics are central to feminine psychol-
ogy and the reproduction of mothering—an observation that has
for many entered the taken-for-granted theoretical lexicon—but
this knowledge only alerts us, in a way in which we might not have
been alerted by classical theory, to notice a woman who does not
bring maternal transferences or fantasies into her treatment. It does
not tell us about what particular fantasies about the mother’s or the
self’s uterus or reproductivity, or what particular intrapsychic
mother–daughter fantasies and transferences, will emerge in a

particular treatment and individual psychology. Psychoanalytic
theory has conflated the universality of some problems that de-
mand psychic representation or solution with the almost infinite
variety of unconscious fantasies and compromise formations that
represent or attempt to address these problems.
A clinical individual employs a number of components in creat-
ing her personal gender and sexuality.8 These include, first, bodily
experience: observation, arousal, comparison with others, changes
in bodily configuration. Freud stressed the observation of genital
difference in the just pre-oedipal child, but the affective tonality
brought to bodily experience and bodily fantasies begin the minute
the child is born, if not before: we now know that from the moment
of birth there are subtle, unconscious transmissions of affect, feel-
ing, and fantasy from mother to child that help to shape the child’s
earliest senses of body. This must include sexed, genital, and repro-
ductive body as well—the particular mother’s complex of feeling
and fantasy about her child’s sex (itself not a generic sex, but the
particularity of her own feelings and history, the other representa-
tions of the child in her inner world, in relation to her own family
of origin, the unconscious and conscious early communications she
received from her own parents, her own cultural location, her own
conflicts and fantasies, etc.). Body and body experience in general,
and because of their special physical intensity or startling absolut-
ism genital and other sexual–erotic experiences (a first period,
breast development, excitement and orgasm, pregnancy, child-
birth, etc.), particularly call forth affective fantasy representation.
Body gets embroiled in sexuality—desire, practices, sexual fanta-
sies, erotization, all of which are so specific to the individual—
which in turn gives further substance to the fantasy meaning of the
sexed body. In theoretical shorthand, we might consider “Freud-
ian” our recognition of the almost raw, self-evident demands of
sexual–bodily–genital experience and observation. The ingredients
that go into bodily gender and sexuality will include some repre-
sentation of sexual difference, but this may or may not be central in
a particular clinical individual.
A second element that goes into femininity and masculinity can
be called, in shorthand, object-relational. Here, I mean that each
person has a uniquely created internal world of unconscious fanta-
sies, about self and other, mother, father, siblings, both whole
object and part object, created through a history of projective and
introjective affective fantasies. Freud’s originally theorized inner
world that relates to gender and sex is the oedipal world, but it is
from Klein especially that we learn about the inner world’s com-
plexity and infantile origins, and that every step in its creation will
be imbued with particular fantasy meanings about self and object,
so that the mother’s breast, for instance, is unconsciously created as
beneficent, aggressive, devouring, withheld, toxic, and so forth,
and that the relation to it is one of manic control, omnipotent
destruction, depressed longing, and so on. As with body experi-
ence, the internal world that helps to create gender begins at birth,
well before the observation of or capacity to label the sexes or
genital difference.
We cannot think about the psychological experience of sex and
gender apart from the cultural and linguistic, since these categories
are both driven by ordinary anatomy and named and created
within culture. From the point of view of the psyche, however,
actual linguistic and cultural labelling is a latecomer. We know
from the research of de Marneffe (1997) that children recognize
which genitals belong to them before they know that they are a girl
or a boy, and we also know of the primacy of parental filtering: any
term that a child learns is learned in the context of the parent’s
unconscious and her or his own particularized femininity or mas-
culinity, which is itself emotionally cast, shaped by fantasy, and
includes many elements of affective tonality and context that that
parent has built into gender. As Loewald puts it,
language is typically first conveyed to the child by the parental

voice and in an all-pervasive way by the mother in the feeding
situation and in all her other ministrations to the infant. In
these situations her speech and voice are part and parcel of the
global mother–child interaction. . . The emotional relationship
to the person from whom the word is learned plays a signifi-
cant, in fact crucial, part in how alive the link between thing
and word turns out to be. [1978, pp. 180, 197).
On the other side, all linguistic and cultural labels are themselves
animated and tinted by unconscious fantasy and affect, which have
to do with myriad experiences with body, self, and other that may
or may not have direct gender content. Thus, the role of masculine
and feminine in the psyche, although having some basis in
anatomic and parental reality, goes through what Klein (1940) calls
“doubling”—a filtering through fantasy and transference such that
external reality is taken into account but only as it is internally
reshaped and created.9
Affective tonality, with or without associated explicit connec-
tion to gendered or sexed fantasy content, as well as non-ostensibly
gender-related fantasies, help to shape masculinity, femininity,
and sexuality. One woman may imbue her sense of femaleness or
femininity with a depressive casting, another with anxiety. Envy,
narcissistic humiliation, reparative fantasies, or self-destructive-
ness and self-attack may shape the dominant affective fantasies
connected to another’s sense of gender. In a set of patients from
more patriarchal cultures, I have noticed that mournful guilt,
“weeping for the mother”, affectively tints their sense of gender
(Chodorow, 1999b), and I have suggested elsewhere that a fantasy
of timelessness or defensive denial of time passing, which has a
separate existence from gender-inflected fantasies and identity,
nonetheless becomes constitutive of the sense of maternality in
some women who have put off motherhood until it is too late
(Chodorow, 2003c).
These components of body, internal world, the transferential
creation of language and culture, and affective tonality all come
together in any person’s sense of gender. Further, each person
creates a personally individualized “prevalent animation of gen-
der” (Chodorow, 1996, 1999b), a conscious and unconscious fan-
tasy constellation that puts these different components together,
with a characteristic affective tonality and an organization de-
signed to manage and contain particular anxieties and defences.
Anyone’s prevalent animation of gender—an organization in
which, out of many complex components of different sorts (body,
internal world, language, affect, dominant fantasies of self and
other), certain are selected, for reasons of fantasy and defence, to
have overarching valence—could be thought of as a compromise
formation. Prevalent animations of gender may bring to the fore
particularly charged affects or particular representations of or rela-
tions to one parent alone. They may be so overwhelmingly driven
by bodily experience—because someone has been born with par-
ticularly strong genital, oral, skin, or other sensitivities, or because

of a combination of innate sensitivities along with parental han-
dling and the unconscious parental communications and responses
that have gone along with this handling—that from the point of
view of the unconscious there is only one sex—that sex which
brings with it all these myriad bodily experiences. For some, gen-
der is a non-central part of identity and sexuality and the sexual
divide uncharged and relatively unnoticed. Others may be ob-
sessed, conflicted, and defined by sexual difference, the absolute of
me as feminine in contrast to me as not-masculine, me with a
female and not a male genital.
Although anyone’s gender always includes some recognition of
the difference between feminine and masculine, a particular per-
son’s prevalent animation of gender may or may not organize
gender around the masculine–feminine difference, and genital
awareness or feelings about the genital difference between the
sexes may or may not form its centre. That is, masculine–feminine
is not in any universal sense more basic than many other organiza-
tions, and even when it is basic in a particular case, the components
of difference do not necessarily privilege the actually observed
genital difference or its fantasy–symbolic representation. Further,
in those for whom the sexual difference dominates both the preva-
lent animation of gender and also the sense of self (where feminin-
ity or masculinity are highly salient in psychic life compared to
other elements that might differentiate or relate self and other),
non-ostensibly gendered elements may or may not be projectively
organized into the feminine/masculine divide, so that the whole
world is divided along gender lines. Here, culture, both as it is
prelinguistically filtered and as it is learned, can help or hinder
such projective fantasies, as cultures themselves differ in the extent
to which they make the sexual divide and difference absolute,
salient, and central. As many feminists have noted, Western cul-
ture projectively maps the binaries of emotion/reason, soft/hard,
passive/active, and so forth onto sexual difference in what we
might call in the individual paranoid–schizoid fashion: the divide
is absolute, with one side representing all that is good and desir-
able and the other all that is bad and to be devalued.
Although I have described the creation of gender as a develop-
mental product, I am thinking retrospectively, from the viewpoint
of the consulting-room. We discover our patients’ unconscious

constructions and fantasies about gender in general and their own
gender in particular, along with the psychodynamics borne of
anxiety and defence that have helped to shape these and their
personal prevalent animation of gender—and I came to think in
terms of these components of gender and sexuality—in piecemeal
fashion, over the course of years, and in the context of our attempts
to understand shifting unconscious fantasies and transferences. In
this context of multiple ingredients and individual creations of
femininity and masculinity, it has seemed to me that two related
creations of sex and gender especially take us beyond sexual differ-
ence. One concerns the multiple ways that the body is experienced,
noticed, and fantasied about, and the other concerns the extent to
which these fantasies and experiences seem to be organized
around the generational rather than the sexual divide. My obser-
vation is that the difference focus, whether beginning from the
presence or absence of the penis or from a non-biological fantasy
system that organizes itself in terms of the differential relation to
the phallus, does not reflect experiential and clinical reality for
many patients, perhaps especially feminine experiential reality and
the bodily senses of sexuality and self that we discover in women.
It is not news that presence or absence of the penis and phallocen-
trism are male-centred, but I also fully expect that, if we were to
bring back to the psychosexuality of men what we have learned
from women, we would find that such a narrow definition does not
match masculine experiential or clinical reality either.
Beginning with Horney (1924, 1926, 1932, 1933), several clini-
cians and theorists have pointed out that Freud’s original perspec-
tive did not accurately portray the girl’s primary sexual and self
organization that emerges from her own body configuration and
her direct bodily experiences. We now call this primary femininity
theory. Following Horney and Klein (1928), Mayer (1986),
Bernstein (1990), Richards (1996), Elise (1997), and others have
argued that there exist specifically feminine genital representations
and experiences—openness, unseenness, diffuseness, a sense of
internality or unboundedness—and female forms of genital (rather
than “castration”) anxieties, for example, fear of penetration, rup-
ture, and diffusivity, that derive from what the girl has rather than
what she does not have. These more specifically female experiences
are also sometimes seen to lead to more typical elements in female

character or experiences of the other (Mayer, for example, notes
that women tend to fear being emotionally closed over and to
notice emotional closedness in men). Following Kestenberg (1956a,
1956b, 1968), Fogel (1998), Elise (2001), and others suggest that men
also have inner genital awareness or fears of penetration similar to
women’s. I would add the observation that what we would con-
sider severe and driven penis envy, desire for a penis, or even a
fantasy penis, may sometimes be found in women to defend
against a much more profound, depressive sense of lack and in-
completeness in comparison to other fully endowed females (for
example, women with breasts or fully functioning internal repro-
ductive organs).
As critique, as theory, and in its closeness to clinical and devel-
opmental observation, the primary femininity perspective was a
great advance. However, because it begins as an argument with
Freud, it does not really get away from the comparative male–
female difference perspective, and it still for the most part retains a
focus on the external genitals—female genital experience and geni-
tal anxieties. It assumes, that is, that the external genitals are
psychologically the criterial defining organs of sex and have, in
women as in men, exclusive or near-exclusive primacy in bodily
femininity. Now, of course, we cannot overemphasize the central-
ity of genital configuration and experience to bodily awareness and
representation, to arousal, excitement, and desire, and to uncon-
scious fantasies, not only about body but about self in the world.
But for many women, certainly (and perhaps in corresponding
fashion for men—we do not know), even when we want to stay
close to the body and to body experiences themselves, other organs
equally define biological femaleness and are experientially and in
unconscious and conscious fantasy as important and intrinsically
defining for them of their femininity and (female) sense of self (see
Notman, 2003, for an excellent overview of “The Female Body and
Its Meanings”).
Beginning developmentally, Notman points to the lack of
breasts and subsequent breast development—visible to the little
girl in comparison with her mother at least as early and as fully as
the sexual genital difference (this paragraph draws throughout
upon Notman). Our infant-centred theory has tended to refer to
“the” breast, but from the point of view of the girl and of women,
it is the breasts, their size, their meaning, their early function in the
infant’s life, and later, their responsiveness to nursing and sexual
stimulation that matter (Notman observes that the girl’s breasts
when they develop are a new organ, and we might add that they
become a different organ again when they are used for nursing).
The inner bodily potential to become a mother—knowledge of the
uterus, the sense that there is a great difference between a little girl
who cannot get pregnant and a mother who can—are important to
a girl from very early on, and as she gets older, the girl’s knowl-
edge of the inner bodily potential to become a mother becomes
concretized and enveloped in fantasy through the experiences of
puberty and menstruation. For some women and girls, reproduc-
tive drives seem as potent and organizing as sexual drives, and we
are as likely to find difficulties and disorders around reproduc-
tivity and fantasies of the reproductive body (the uterus, the ova-
ries, menstruation) as of sexuality in women. A focus on the genital
difference (especially as such a focus has been, with the exception
of Kestenberg, mainly on the external genital, even if this genital
has an opening to internality) misses all of these bodily experiences
and their potential psychological concomitants, that are equally
feminine, equally emerge from the body, and are developmentally
and clinically central to what many women mean by and experi-
ence as their femininity. In addition, suggests Notman, we some-
times find women centring their femininity around weight, whose
connection to sexuality and gender can, we know, follow different
paths in different women. We could add that facial hair, pubic hair,
and bodily hairiness, among other non-genital or reproductive
features, may also play a role in women’s sense of femininity or its
lack—facial hair “masculinizing” women, pubic hair giving them
the body of an adult woman as opposed to that of a little girl.
Women vary in the extent to which they organize their bodily
femininity around the genital difference, or even around genital
experience and its representations over other aspects of body and
reproductivity, and in the extent to which their prevalent anima-
tion of gender is bodily in the first place.
In The Power of Feelings, I describe K. It was in thinking about K
that I felt called upon to theorize how a woman could make bodily
and even external genital configuration, but not sexual difference,
central to her sense of femaleness (the following summarizes my

case description, pp. 84–86). For K, the most salient aspects of
gender were not primarily organized around the male–female
polarity. Although these were present in her fantasy life, her com-
parisons of herself to men were not that salient and were centred
mainly in conscious fantasies about men and women in the work
world; whether or not she had a penis was not so noticed; and her
desires for men and fantasies about what a relationship to a man
might bring her (whether directly in terms of sexual gratification,
for a sense of narcissistic completion or confirmation, for rescue,
etc.) were not that elaborated. Yet although feminine versus mascu-
line were not so central, K definitely organized her gender with
reference to the genital body. She organized her bodily gender, with
great feeling and fantasy elaboration, in terms of the little girl/
mother polarity. She felt herself to be an inadequate little girl with
inadequate little genitals, but her locus of comparison was grown
women—originally her mother—with adult genitals. She had im-
ages of this felt comparative inadequacy from as far back as early
latency, and they were also active in early and middle adolescence.
Shame and disgust were the affective tonalities that character-
ized K’s animation of gender and experience of her female body,
whether she imagined herself as a little girl or as a grown woman.
In one fantasy sense of body, she was an inadequate little girl with
little-girl genitals, but both during development and currently, she
also felt that grown women’s bodies are intrinsically problematic.
Pregnancy and menstruation, for example, give women cramps,
make them weak, sluggish, and heavy, and remind women that
they are tied to these uncontrollable bodies.
Heterosexual relationships posed a conflictual solution to K’s
shame. A strong, masculine man could help her appreciate her
feminine body and make her feel successfully feminine, but he also
by his presence served as a reminder of her weakness and the
general shamefulness and weakness of femininity. But when she
was involved with men whom she perceived as not so convention-
ally masculine, even though she was not so reminded of her own
weakness, she felt inadequate as a heterosexual feminine woman,
which was shameful in its own way. A further quandary for K was
her conscious self-identification as a feminist, which made her, as
she put it, “hate to think that women are weak”.
K, then, was focused on external genital configuration as central

to femininity, and in this sense she followed the original Freudian
claim. However, her locus of comparison was not the penis and
sexual difference, but, rather, the difference between having a little
girl’s and a grown woman’s genitals. A same sex–different genera-
tion comparison located in the external genitals constituted K’s
prevalent animation of gender. Also according to the Freudian
claim, dominant affective tonalities were involved in K’s sense of
difference, but for her the comparison elicited shame and disgust,
not envy. Shame was prevalent when she thought of herself as
having an inadequate little-girl body in comparison to that of a
fully formed woman, but the alternative was no better: when she
fantasied the menstrual excretions, pregnancies, and sexual and
maternal excess that come with the fully adult woman’s body that
she also felt she had, she felt disgust and disdain for weakness, out-
of-controllness, and vulnerability.
Different women may parse the body and difference divide in
other ways. For some women, the comparison and main constitu-
ents of gender may also be bodily and, as with K, generational, but
focused on the adult woman–little girl difference more fully in
terms of reproductive internality. For one woman, a uterus, cervix,
and internal vaginal opening—structured and elaborated insides—
contrast with her own emptiness or nothing; for another, the all-
too-present maternal uterus, which has produced too many babies,
is attacked through an attack on one’s own all-too-present uterus,
for instance, in multiple abortions (see Chodorow, 2003c; Pine,
1982, 1990). In these cases, body is internal and reproductive rather
than external and genital, but the main locus of difference and
relation remains same-sex. For still other women, the male–female
difference may be primary but body secondary: they organize
gender predominantly through internal objects that meet or do not
meet felt needs rather than through the body—we might say
anaclitically rather than narcissistically. I describe in The Power of
Feelings one woman who animates gender predominantly in light
of the man she cannot be, in terms of affective organization and
behaviour (a projective fantasy of her father’s and brother’s sense
of entitlement) and another who animates it predominantly in
terms of the man she cannot have (a depressively toned longing for
a divorced and thereby lost and romanticized father).
I am implying that, much as primary femininity theory is a

major advance over the phallocentrism of the traditional sexual
difference perspective, and much as it certainly describes the
bodily–sexual animation of gender for many women, even this
non-male-centred sexual difference perspective bypasses two ele-
ments that I have found to be equally prevalent in sex/gender:
first, difference, comparison, and relation that crosses generation
but is single-sex and, second, sexed-gendered body that is not
centred on the external genitals. Similarly, although male–female
will certainly enter into any woman’s construction of femininity,
femininity for women always involves not only their relation to
masculinity, but also (and sometimes with much more force) their
relation to generational difference, to femininity as little girl or
grown woman, mother or not mother, what mother has and little
girl does not have.
For men also, I have now come to theorize masculinity as not
only not-female, as I had emphasized in The Reproduction of Mother-
ing, and as would be consonant with Freud’s centring sexual differ-
ence on the presence or absence of the penis, but also as involving
the man/boy dichotomy. When the developing boy compares him-
self or fantasizes his masculinity, it is not only in relation to his
female, vaginal (“castrated”) mother (with breasts, Klein would
add). Difference also inheres in his comparison of himself, with his
little penis and his small size, to his male father, with a large penis
and testicles, pubic hair, large size, and seeming personal power,
and in this comparison, humiliation and inadequacy, rather than
castration, are the threat (similarly, our case reports suggest that
male patients are as likely to feel inadequate and humiliated as
they are to feel potentially castrated in relation to their male ana-
lysts). When a man’s “masculinity” is threatened, it is as often
because he feels like an inadequate and humiliated little boy vis-à-
vis other (adult, masculine) men, created as a subordinate mascu-
linity, rather than because he feels feminized, or “castrated.” As I
put it in “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity” (Chodorow, 2003a),
where I discuss some of the psychodynamics of masculinity that
seem to underlie terrorism and homophobia:
I am suggesting that Freud was right, in “Analysis Terminable
and Interminable”, when he suggested that men’s conflicts
about passivity with regard to another man are psychological
bedrock, but he was wrong to call this femininity: the

superordinate–subordinate, male–male relationship is not re-
ducible to a male–female relationship [Chodorow, 2003a, p. 99]
If we return to Freud and the other classical theories, my clinical

observations of same-sex different-generation components to femi-
ninity and masculinity are not completely a theoretical surprise.
The theory of the Oedipus complex in both its simple and complete
forms, while instigated by and in the classical account resolved
through castration anxiety or the desire for a penis, in fact makes
generation as well as gender central. This dual focus on the psychic
role of gender and generation has been especially theorized by
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984, 1986) and McDougall (1986), but the
terms themselves mitigate against seeing that generation itself may
be intrinsically gendered. Both boy and girl evaluate the inad-
equacy, as well as the vulnerability, of their organ in relation to the
same-sex parent, even as they also notice and make something of
their organ’s difference from and capacity to satisfy the opposite
sex (or, in the becoming-gay case, the same-sex) parent. In fact,
same-generation—sibling—difference, which is often convention-
ally alluded to in discussions of difference—“the little girl sees the
little boy and knows that she wants what he has”—seems a lesser
component in the cross-sex comparison for most people. That
same-sex different-generation components would be central to
femininity and masculinity could be predicted from this originary
theory: they are directly discussed in relation to father–son and
could be easily extrapolated in terms of mother–daughter bodily
relations, difference, and comparison as well. When we add Klein’s
account of the early Oedipus conflict and her view that idealization
of the penis develops in both sexes as a defence against the child’s
sense of the power of the maternal breast, we can especially see
classical roots for the girl’s location in a non-phallocentric same-sex
different-generation complex that does not centre on the external
genitals.
Of course, all of these classical theories have required major
modification and critique, as I have discussed throughout this
chapter. Especially, psychoanalytic and feminist critics have
pointed to the need to emphasize the primary meanings of the
female body for women and girls and to challenge the near-com-
plete lack of attention to maternality in all the classic accounts, with
the exception of Horney. It has been necessary to elaborate upon

the intrinsic, non-phallocentric development of reproductivity and
maternality in women and to rethink female sexuality to restore
theoretically to women the undoubted clinical and experiential
reality of female sexual passion and desire that cannot be elicited
from Freud’s aseptic account. But even with the need for these
major modifications, the classical theories of the Oedipus complex
that we inherit from Freud, Lampl-de Groot, Horney, Klein, and
others, which include serious attention to generational object-rela-
tions as well as to gendered body, provide more of a foundation for
the rethinking of femininity and masculinity than the sexual differ-
ence perspective tout court.
I have suggested several problems with the sexual difference
perspective: First, it universalizes what is clinically individual and
variable, and it reduces to one component, through a structural
linguistics rereading of Freud’s emphasis on the presence or ab-
sence of the penis, the many constitutive components that go into
anyone’s femininity or masculinity. Second, this perspective ig-
nores other non-external genital but equally prominent bodily
observations, comparisons, experiences, and fantasies that con-
struct bodily imaged masculinity and femininity. Third, these
other forms of embodiment often arise from and lead to a differ-
ence perspective that emphasizes same-sex cross-generation differ-
ence. My observations arise from the clinical consulting-room, but
they result in a theoretical critique and an alternative theory. Femi-
ninity and masculinity are created through comparison with the
other sex, but they are equally created through the psychic process-
ing of directly powerful bodily experience, through the ways they
are lived in the context of the entire psychic life of the individual,
and through comparison with those of the same sex but of a dif-
ferent generation.
NOTES
1. In “Freud on Women” (Chodorow, 1994) and my recent “Foreword”
(Chodorow, 2000) to Freud’s Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, I suggest that
Freud had many approaches to the psychology of women and complex, non-
polarized understandings of the sexualities.
2. Butler (1990) is the leading post-structuralist feminist who also draws

upon psychoanalysis, but Scott (1988), for example, also explicitly argues for
the exclusively relational meanings of male and female or masculinity and
femininity from a historical–culturalist post-structural perspective.
3. Scott would be an example of someone who uses the term “gender”
more or less exclusively—that is, except when she is specifically discussing
sexuality—but who at the same time always thinks in terms of gender difference.
4. The terms “sense of maleness” and “sense of femaleness” are taken
from Stoller (1965, 1968), but I am using them to mean not just core gender
identity but all of the unconscious and conscious fantasies and constructions
that go into a person’s subjective gender.
5. My starting from clinical experience, from a pragmatic rather than
theory-driven view, and from more iconoclasm towards Freud, may mark me
as a North American—see Goldberg (2002); Special Issue of Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 2004, “What’s American about American Psychoanalysis?”; also G.
Klein (1973). Although many continental European, English, and Latin Ameri-
can analysts begin from the clinical and a more inductive view of theory, there
is also perhaps within these non-North American psychoanalytic cultures a
tendency towards more textual and theoretical fidelity to Freud.
6. In “Freud on Women” (Chodorow, 1994), I suggest that the Demeter–
Persephone story provides a better classical grounding for the Freud–Lampl-de
Groot–Deutsch account of the female Oedipus complex, though I note that such
a reading minimizes the daughter’s hostility to the mother that these theorists
also describe. (See also Foley, 1999, which reprints Chodorow, 1974, and
Holtzman & Kulish, 2000, and Kulish & Holtzman, 1998.)
7. Within psychoanalysis itself at this point there was little rethinking of
the psychology of women, with the very important exceptions of Kestenberg
(1956a, 1956b, 1968) and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1964).
8. I use the term “clinical individual” to stress the distinction between the
universals that our theory has tended to claim and the unique individuals
whom we treat, whose particular instantiations of a theory will have been
developmentally particular and will be created in historically particular ways
in the transference–countertransference and in other indications of uncon-
scious fantasy over the course of treatment.
9. On the uses of Klein for understanding gender and sex, see Birkstead-
Breen, 1999, and Chodorow, 1999a.
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INDEX
A
Abraham, K., 44 obligatory, maternal love as effect
abuse, 4, 160 of, 7, 55
maternal, 33 Alizade, M., xiv, 65
physical, 34 Ambrosio, G., xiv
sexual, 69 American Beauty, 160–163
see also incest anal-erotic/anal-sadistic impulses,
verbal, 34 29
active–passive polar anatomical difference between
complementarity as function sexes, 5, 13, 45, 103, 105–106
of discharge, 153 anatomy as destiny, 26–27
see also passivity Anatrella, T., 129
affect(s): André, J., 44, 52
maleness and femaleness in, 182 Andreas-Salomé, L., 43, 138, 141
undigested, 17 “Anna O” [Freud’s patient], 24
affective fantasies, introjective and Annell, C., xiv, 22
projective, 188 anorexia, 50
affective tonality, and sense of Anscombe, E., 130
gender, 189 anthropology, structuralist, Lévi-
Agacinski, S., 129 Straussian, 182
Agape, 50 Antigone, 76
Alcorn, D., 90 complex, 76, 77
alienation: law of, 76
and mirror stage, 65, 116 Anzieu, D., 43
205
206 INDEX
Aristophanes, 8, 60 experience of, 194

Aristotle, 54, 56 primary meanings of, 197
Aron, L., 168 as idealist construct, 94
arousal, individual self-regulation image, female, 29–30
of, 163 –mind split and excess, 150–152
asexuality, 68 sexed, fantasy meaning of, 187
attachment theory, 153 unconscious representation of, 29
attractiveness, human, and desire, Bollas, C., 131
174–176 Bracken, W. F., 126
Augustine, 112 breast:
Austin, J. L., 95, 131, 137 maternal, relation with, 188
autism, endogenous, 47 as transcendental signifier of
autoerotic activities, 29, 31 difference, 105
compulsive [clinical example], Brennan, T., 162
150–152 Bridget, St, 142
B Britzman, D., 176
Balzac, H. de, 125 Buber, M., 19, 179
Barkay, P., xv bulimia, 50
Barthes, R., 129 Buss, D., 178
Bassin, D., 168 Butler, J., 74, 128–129, 199
Beauvoir, S. de, 13–14, 70, 93–97, C
101–102, 107, 117, 125–128, castration (passim):
137–138, 140–142 anxiety, 5, 27, 46–47, 118, 182, 197
Beebe, B., 147, 153 female, 35
Be My Knife (Grossman), 155–157 central to Lacanian and Freudian
Benjamin, H., 84 theories of femininity, 3
Benjamin, J., ix, xiv, 3, 5, 10, 17–19, complex, 47, 70–71, 76
125–126, 145–171, 173–180 concept of, 15, 117–121
Bernheimer, C., 108 Freud’s, 117–121
Bernini, G. L., 110, 154 fear of, 34
Bernstein, D., 191 as punishment for
Best Years of Our Lives, The, 166–171, masturbation, 30
176 vs. finitude, 121–135
binary oppositions, 6–9 Freud’s theory of, 97–135
binary reasoning, 6–7, 53–66 imaginary, 16
biological gender, 84 Lacan’s theory of, 96–135
Birkstead-Breen, D., 199 repudiation of, 118
bisexuality, 47, 85, 100 senses of, 123
psychic, 5, 42, 44 symbolic, 16, 167
Bjerrum Nielsen, H., xiv, 22 Cavell, S., 95–96, 101, 113, 116, 120–
bodily experience, 77, 187–193, 198 123, 130–131, 137
identification with, 169 cell division, 8, 59
body: Charcot, J., 62, 65
ego, 71 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., 82, 197, 199
experience of, 80–81 Chiland, C., ix, xiv, 9, 11, 12, 79–91,
female, 97 96, 121, 122, 123, 127
INDEX 207
child, seduced, orificial, invaded, creativity and sexuality, 32–33, 149

42–43 cross-generational relations, 20–21,
childbirth, 81, 86, 187 181–203
childhood trauma(ta), 36 cultural anthropology, 12, 85
Chodorow, N., x, xiv, 10, 19–21, 125– cultural pessimism, 177
126, 158, 181–203 culture:
Cixous, H., 185 man aligned with in patriarchal
clinical individual(ity), 183, 187 binary thinking, 7
clinical scene, view from, 19–21 vs. nature, 6
Clinton, W., 164 and perception of biological
clitoris, 26, 86 differences, 178
excitation, 5, 25, 26, 43–45, 48 transferential creation of, and
significance of for Freud, 3 sense of gender, 189
Coates, S., 156 D
Collin, F., 129 daughter position, 18, 146, 157–160
Coltart, N., 131 Davies, J. M., 147, 149
communication, 176 Dean, T., 127, 128
unconscious, 147 death:
Conant, J., 114 as accident, with asexual
concept(s): reproduction, 8, 59
abstract: drive, 7–8, 58–59, 62–63
claim to generalizability, 2 see also Thanatos
claim to scientific relevance, 2 as structural necessity, with
claim to universality, 1, 2 sexual reproduction, 8, 59
as part of metapsychology, 1 as trauma, 121
formation of, 1 defloration, 81
congenital adrenal hyperplasia, 83 “Deirdre” [clinical example], 159–
constructivism vs. essentialism, 12 160
constructivistic approach, 7 de Marneffe, 188
container, 156, 161 dependency, repudiation of, 162
body as, for mind, 150–152, 154 depressive position, 47, 168
daughter position as, 18, 146, 148, depressivity, chronic, 50
150, 153, 158 Derrida, J., 110, 130, 131
of discharge, penis as, 156 de Saussure, F., 19
for excess, 162 Descartes, R., 102
maternal, 156 desire(s):
mother as, 158 concept of, 19, 175, 176
containment: feminine, 38
affective, failure of, 149 ownership of, 164
maternal, 147 Deutsch, H., 32, 73, 126, 184, 199
of tension, 18 development:
Corbett, G., 84 psychosexual, 8
Corbett, K., 168, 186 female, 4, 41
countertransference, 32, 116, 199 Freud’s theory of, 25, 98, 186
couvade, 86 psychosomatic, 4
Crary, A., 131 theory of, female-centred, 185
208 INDEX
deviancy, shared, in couples, 36 enigmatic signifiers, 4, 42

deviation, sexual, in women, 4 envy:
dialectic, notion of, 174 boy’s vs. girl’s, 28
Diamond, C., 114, 115, 130 and sense of gender, 189
Di Ceglie, D., 87 Eros, 7–8, 50, 57–60, 62–63, 167, 177–
differentiation, 185 178
active/passive, 57 as antithesis of reproduction, 178
gender, 8, 61, 62, 148 and fusion, 8, 60
Dimen, M., 152 identification, hysteria,
dimorphism, 18, 174 femininity, 62
Dinnerstein, D., 158, 179 lightness of being, 19, 54, 178
discharge: scattering of, 58
of mental excess, 18 and surrender and death, 19
of tension, 18–19 see also life drive; Zoë
bodily, in monadic economy, eroticization as defence, 36
152 erotics of recognition, therapeutic,
male, 154, 175 167
and virtue, 179 erotism:
“Dora” [Freud’s patient], 24, 44 oral, vs. oral aggression, 29
drive(s): pregenital:
death (Thanatos), 7–8, 58–59, 62– and archaic, 2
63 unconscious, 36
see also Thanatos essentialism vs. constructivism, 12
Freud’s theory of, 7, 11, 57–60, 63– evolutionary psychology, 178
66 excess, 145, 146
life (Eros), 7, 58–59, 63 experience of, 17
see also Eros; Zoë mental, and discharge of tension,
reproductive, 193 18, 146–147
dualism, 6, 57, 60 and mind–body split, 150–152
binary, 57 problem of, 146–149, 154
classical, 53 and gender positions, 163
gender, 7, 53 male solution to, 154
E and splitting, 154
ego: exhibitionism, 35
body, 71 existentialist phenomenology, 137
ideal, attainment of, 47 exploitation, 175
of mirror stage, 72 F
sexed, 10, 71 fantasy constellation, conscious and
Eigen, M., 146 unconscious, and sense of
Elise, D., 155, 191, 192 gender, 189
“Emmy von N” [Freud’s patient], 24 Fassin, E., 129
energy, concept of, as mental, Fast, I., 168
psychological phenomenon, father:
153 –aggressor, identification with,
“enigmatic message”, parent–child, 155
17, 147–148, 150, 153 female desire for, 42
INDEX 209
girl as object of, 49 as outside language, 95, 109–117

incestuous, 158 and passivity, 100
name of, 42 plurality of versions of, 51
oedipal, 54, 158 polymorphous, of primary
passive attitude in relation to, as oedipal phase, 47
essence of feminine, 145 as position constructed in
perverse, 160–163 language, 94
phallic, 156 pre-oedipal components, 184
primal, myth of, 6, 54 primary:
symbolic, 48 failure in integration of, 30
as third figure, 48 theory, 21, 184, 185
Federation of Feminist Women’s reactional, 5, 47
Health Centers, 38 rejection of, 50
femaleness, sense of, 194 repudiation of, 15, 118, 119, 163
female position, 4–5 riddle of, 12–13, 24–25, 96–102,
female subordination, modelled on 114, 138, 145–171
master–slave relationship, vs. sexual difference, 13
175 theory(ies), 13, 16, 95, 97, 99, 121,
feminine body, 97 124, 125, 138
experience of, 194 classical psychoanalytic, 12,
primary meanings of, 197 137
somatopsychic images as mental vs. feminist theory, 137–143
representations of, 4, 26 Freud’s, 14, 93–94, 100, 141
feminine position, 47, 158 Lacan’s, 14, 93–94, 106–107,
of female, 47, 106–107 109
of male, 43, 47, 106 primary, 191–192, 196
femininity: feminism, phallic, 140
accommodating, receiving, feminist(s), 80
mirroring, 162 feminist theory vs. femininity
as beyond phallus, 95 theory, 137–143
and castration, 14 féminité, meanings of, 13, 105, 106
as construction by male psyche, fertility, 81, 89
17–18, 145 fetish, 106, 167
Freud’s theory of, 3, 97–135 fetishism, 36, 46, 106
generalization in, 140 finitude, 15, 16, 96
Lacan’s concept of, 3, 96, 97–135 aspects of, 122–135
and phallus, 102–109 and castration, 121–135
and masculinity, 6 human, 139
constitutive components of, as political alibi, 139
183 Wittgenstein’s picture of, 121
intersubjective view of, 145– ontological, 122
171 sexual, 118, 120, 122, 124
as metaphysical concept, 14 spatial, 122
model of, Victorian woman as, 23 temporal, 122
normative, 14, 107 Flordh, C., xv
open to symbolic, 53 Fogel, G., 192
210 INDEX
Foley, H., 199 one-person economy, 17, 146

Fonagy, P., 65, 146 passivity, definition of, 17
Foucault, M., 19, 175, 176 patriarchal thinking of, 70, 75, 137
Francis of Assisi, 51 phallic monism, 41
Freedman, D., 87 phallocentrism of, 3, 11, 33, 70, 72
Freud, A., 44 polymorphously perverse infant,
Freud, S. (passim): 82
“Anna O”, 24 primal father, myth of, 6, 54
bisexuality, 85 protection from trauma, 166
castration, concept of, 15 reproduction and sexuality, 68
clitoris, assimilation of into penis, repudiation of femininity, 15, 118,
26, 86 119
concept of the unconscious, 3, 24 riddle of femininity, 145
debt of, to women, 24 seduction as traumatic
denigration of femininity, 26 helplessness, 154
discharge as male, 19 significance of phallus for, 7
“Dora”, 24, 44 theories of femininity, castration
drive for mastery, 64 as central point of, 3
drive theory of, 7, 11, 57–60, 63–66 theories of sexual difference, 3
see also death drive; Eros; life Triebmischung, 8, 60, 63
drive; Thanatos; Zoë Victorian prejudices of, 23
“Emmy von N”, 24 elevated to theory, 27
experience of excess, 17, 154 Friedman, R., 156
on female psychosexual G
development, 25, 98, 186 Gallop, J., 107–108, 127, 129
on female sexualities, 2–4, 23–39 Garréta, A. F., 128
on feminine passivity, 100–102, Gaspard, F., 128, 129
146 gender:
on femininity: binary, structural role of, 139
and castration, 14, 138 biological, 84
normative, 14, 107 as category of historical analysis,
theory of, 93–135, 139, 141, 69
145–171 complementarity, 168
focus on genital difference, 182, as concept, introduction of, 83–85
184, 187, 196 conception of, and dualism, 53–
idealization of motherhood, 33 66
interest in women’s sexuality, 24 as developmental product, 20,
“Irma”, 24 190
“Katharina”, 24 differentiation, 8, 61, 62, 148
libido theory of, 11, 123, 131, 152 as expression of “being”, 12, 85
“Lucy R”, 24 grammatical, 84
motherhood, preoccupation with, identification, 148
70 identity, 9, 29, 64, 82, 83–85, 88
Nachträglichkeit, 110 core, 84
Oedipus complex, 71 disorder, 83, 88
INDEX 211
intrapsychic, 185 “her-story”, 16, 141

as invention of society, 84 heterosexuality, 71, 74, 76
meaning of term, constructivistic Hoffmann, E. T. A., 131
aproach to, 7 Holtzman, D., 199
organization of sexuality, 179 homophobia, 196
positions, 145, 163–164 homosexuality, 76
and Oedipus complex, 155 female, 49, 99
reversal, 167 primary, 37–38
re-visioning, 163 homunculus theory, 54
role, 18, 83, 84 Hooker, E., 84
attainment of, 34 Horney, K., 21, 28, 125–126, 141, 157,
reversal, 165 184, 191, 198
vs. sexual difference, 9–12, 67–78, Hurt, J., 178
79–91, 186 Hurtig, E., xiv
signifiers, 157 hysteria, male, 56, 71
as social construct, 86 hysteric(s), 50, 72
theory(ies): female and male, and sexual
vs. practice, 1 difference, 9, 71
in psychoanalysis, 12 Freud’s study of, 18, 145, 158
and violence, 11, 68 hysterical compulsion to associate,
gendered sexuality, conscious 58
beliefs vs. hidden agendas, 2 I
genetics, recent developments in, 11 idealization, 5, 44, 47
genital representation of as inner identification:
space, 29 with father, 54
Gergely, G., 65 -aggressor, 155
Geschlecht, 86 feminine, 157, 160
Ghazali, Imam, 19, 179 forms of, 176
Ghent, E., 165 gender, 148
girl, target of desire of, 48 with girl, 160
Glover, E., 34 and intersubjective moment, 176
Godelier, M., 81, 82 introjective, 186
Goldberg, A., 199 with mother:
grammatical gender, 84 feminine, 30, 45, 158–159
Green, A., 68 repudiation of, 155–156
Greenson, R., 168 phallic, 46, 49
Grossman, D., 155–157, 162, 164, 166 primary, 47
guillotine complex, 16 mirror stage, 63
guilt, mournful, and sense of projective, 157, 186
gender, 189 sexualized, 160
H identity:
Härdelin, S., xiv vs. anatomical sex, 53
Haugsgjerd, S., xiv, 22 feminine and masculine, division
Hegel, G. D. F., 50, 70, 110 of, 55
Herdt, G., 86 formation, and drive, 59
212 INDEX
identity (continued): intersubjective moment, 19, 173,

gender, 84, 85 176–177, 179
acquisition of, 9, 29, 64 intersubjective sharing, 19
core, 84 intersubjectivity, 173
disorder, 88 intrapsychic events, dynamics of,
role, 84 173
threat to, 82 intrapsychic gender, 185
imaginary, child’s, 6 Irigaray, L., 114–116, 126, 185
psychosexual, 7, 55 “Irma” [Freud’s patient], 24
vs. biological sex, 55 “Isabelle” [clinical example], 148,
sense of, loss of, 35 150–152
sexual, 26, 34, 85 Isay, R., 186
choice of, 47 J
subjective, 35 Jacobus, M., 28
incest, 18, 33, 34, 67, 158 Jones, E., 70
individuality, clinical, 183, 187 jouissance, 14, 96, 109–117, 125, 127,
individuation, 8, 185 129
infancy: beyond phallus, 110, 114
research, 153 outside language, 111
universal bisexual wishes of, 37 vaginal, 111
infant(s): Jung, C. G., 68
phobias of, 47 Jurist, E., 65
polymorphously perverse, 11, 69, K
73, 82 “K” [clinical example], 193–195
infantile sexuality, 26, 42, 72, 73, 74, Kaplan, G., x, xiv, 17–19, 173–180
82 Kaplan, S., xiv
inner space: “Katharina” [Freud’s patient], 24
genital as, 29 Kestenberg, J., 21, 184, 192–193, 199
girl’s fears centred on, 35 Kihlbom, M., xiv
man’s fears of, projected onto Klein, G., 199
women, 3, 24 Klein, M., 28, 44, 141, 155, 188–189,
inner world, complexity of, 188 191, 196–199
interactive subjectivity, 5 knowledge, eternal pursuit of, 2
interiority, 45–46, 51 Kowner, R., 174
early, 45 Kristeva, J., x, xiv, 4–6, 15, 17, 31, 41–
psychic, 45, 47 52, 53–66, 126, 130, 137, 185
internal shield, 166 Kulish, N., 199
internal space, 5 L
internal world, maleness and Lacan, J. (passim):
femaleness in, 182 castration, concept of, 15
intersexed, 80, 83–84, 88–89, 122 femininity:
intersubjective economy, 146, 152, and castration, 3, 14
163 normative, 14, 107
of recognition and mutual theory of, 93–135, 139
regulation, 154 linguistic model of, 19
intersubjective failure, 153 mirror stage, 126
INDEX 213
primacy of phallus for, 7, 42, 138 Lévi-Strauss, C., 83

symbols in, 102 Lewinsky, M., 164
theories of sexual difference, 3 libido, 27, 46, 93
Lachmann, F. M., 147, 153 Freud’s economy of, 152
Lagache, D., 127–128 male, 72
Lamizet, B., 129 concept, 25
Lampl-de Groot, J., 184, 198–199 only one, 11, 123
language, 14–15, 95, 105 life drive, 7, 58–59, 63
access to, phallic pleasure in, 6, 48 see also Eros; Zoë
acquisition, and individuation, 8 lightness of being, 19, 54, 178
Bourdieu’s theory of, 137 linguistic model, de Saussure’s, 19
development of, 48, 60 linguistics:
essence of, 112 post-Saussurean, 14, 94, 108–109,
femininity as position 112
constructed in, 94 Lacan’s, 96
Lacanian theory of, 105, 111, 113, structuralist, Saussurean, 182
125 Linton, R., 178
limit to, 115 Lipietz, A., 129
mad, 115–117 Loewald, H. W., 188
normative, of sexual difference, “Lucy R” [Freud’s patient], 24
109 M
“outside”, 95–96, 109–117 Mack Brunswick, R., 141, 184
post-Saussurean theory of, 14, 95, Mannoni, O., 73
109, 112, 116 masculine–feminine polarity, 163
of reason, 114–115 masculine protest, 117
spatial picture of, 111–112 masculinity:
symbolic, 114 defensive activity, 162
theory of, vs. theory of vs. femininity, 6
representation, 112–117 phallic, failure of, 166
transferential creation of, 188 riddle of, 13, 96, 102
and sense of gender, 189 and struggle to get in, 160–163
Wittgenstein’s theory of, 96, 112– and symbolic, link between, 7
113 theory of, 96
Lantz, P., xiv masochism, 43, 46
Laplanche, 4, 17, 42, 147–148, 153 feminine, 159
latency, 76 masturbation, and femininity, 30–31
lateral gender sexuality, 76 maternality, 189, 197
lateral relationships, 10, 75–76, 158 development of:
lateral sexuality, 10, 76 fundamental to femininity, 184
laterality, 77 non-phallocentric, 198
Lear, J., 131 maternal instinct, 42, 52
Le Doeuff, M., 129 as myth, 7, 55
Leighton, S., 52 Matthis, I., x, 1–22
Lerner, G., 141 Mauthner, M., 77
lesbian(s), 99 May, R., 168
Lessing, D., 142 Mayer, E. L., 191–192
214 INDEX
McDougall, J., xi, xiv, 2–4, 7, 15, 23– fundamental to femininity, 184
39, 96, 103, 121–122, 125– reproduction of, 186
126, 131, 139, 148, 197 mourning, for loss of intact body,
Mead, M., 12, 85 167, 177
meiosis [cell division], 8, 59 Muslim tradition, 19, 179
melancholia, 50 My Father Is Coming, 67
men, fear of women of, as projection N
of inner pregenital fantasies, Nachträglichkeit, 110
3, 24 Nakano, G. E., 179
menarche, 81 Naked Civil Servant, The, 178
menopause, 31, 32, 71, 81 narcissism, 12, 43, 46, 85
menses, 81 maternal, 44
menstruation, 31, 71, 193, 194 pathological vs. healthy, 85
mentalization, 146 register of, 85
Merleau-Ponty, M., 13, 94, 95, 137 narcissistic economy, 9, 67
Mernissi, F., 179 narcissistic humiliation, and sense
metalanguage, rational, 16 of gender, 189
metapsychology, abstract concepts narcissistic omnipotence, 15, 119
as part of, 1 nature:
Metternich, Princess, 74 vs. culture, 6
mirroring, dualistic, 53 woman aligned with, in
mirror stage, 6, 10, 54, 65, 72, 116 patriarchal binary thinking,
primary identification of, 63 7
Mitchell, J., xi, xiv, 9–12, 67–78, 79– Necander-Redell, L., xv
91, 118, 125–129, 139, 152 Neikos [strife], 59
Moi, T., xi, xiv, 3, 12–17, 93–135, 137– neurosis, traumatic, 58
143 Norman, J., xiv
monadic economy, 152–153 Notman, M. T., 192–193
Money, J., 83, 84 Nygren, L.-G., xiv
monosexuality, trauma of, 28, 122 O
Montelatici Prawitz, D., xv Oakley, A., 69
mother: object:
asexual, 68 choice, 183
–daughter relationship, early, 4 link with, stable, 47
feminine identification with, 30 loss, 148
rejection of, by daughter, 37 defence against, 50
seductive introjected, 5, 44 relations, 10, 71
motherhood, 7, 24, 27–29, 51, 70, 86, theory, 86
94 oedipal father, 54, 158
asexual, 11, 72 oedipal phase, 44
deferred, 189 primary, 4–6, 41–47, 49–50
Freud’s idealization of, 33, 93 complexity of, 46
and human reproduction, 10 economy of, 45
perverse, 4, 33–34, 55 receptivity of, 6, 51
mothering: vs. secondary, 6
function, 20 secondary, 4, 6, 44, 49–50
INDEX 215
ambiguity of, 49–51 patriarchal social system, 6, 49, 53,

and phallicism, 46–48 139, 189
Oedipus complex, 4, 20, 41, 64, 71, patriarchal thinking, 7, 16, 55–56,
82, 85, 155, 186, 197, 198 137, 140
female, 184 in Freudian psychoanalysis, 70,
gender identity as sequel to, 9 75
girl’s, 34 penis:
male, 34 desire for, and primary
resolution of, 182 homosexuality, 37
Oedipus conflict, 186, 197 envy, 28, 33, 37, 94–95, 117, 119,
Oedipus Rex, 76 138–139, 157, 182, 192
Ogden, T., 158 Freud on, 93
omnipotence, narcissistic, 15, 119 precursors of, 26
one-person economy, 17, 18, 146, role of in female development,
173 184
oral phase, 186 idealization of, 197
orifices, significance of, 4, 7, 42, 57, and phallus, Lacan’s theory of,
155 102–109
orificial ego, 43 vs. phallus, 13, 48
Ostas, M., 131 Person, E., 84
Ovesey, L., 84 perverse, human sexuality as, 82
Oyama, S., 174 perverse motherhood, 4, 33, 34
Ozouf, M., 129 perversion(s), 73, 82
P as erotic form of hatred, 35
paraplegics, 80 sexual, 4, 33, 34
parental sexuality, 148 perversity, 11
passivity, 17–19, 53, 65, 100–101, phallic authority, structuring role
145–148, 163–168, 196 of, 5, 46
acceptance of, 177 phallic component, structuring,
and activity, 153–157 46
split between, 145 phallic fusion, 58
experience of, 165 phallic kairos, 47
and failure of containment, 146 phallic loss, 61
fear of, 162 phallic phase, 5, 41, 43, 47
male, 167 phallic position, 49
ownership of, 164 feminine, 49
perverse, 167 phallic primacy, 42
projection of, boy’s, 18 ascendancy of, 4
receptivity in, 18 phallic stage, 5, 48
oral and anal, 45 phallicism, and secondary oedipal
reformulation of, 163–165 phase, 46–48
sexual, 17, 146 phallocentric metaphors, Freud’s,
and surrender, 165 3
working through experiences of phallocentric theory, 3, 11, 20–21,
excess, 146 70–72
patriarchal ideologies, 141 phallocentrism, 33, 191, 196
216 INDEX
phallus (passim): primal division, 61

denial of, 50 primal father, 54
identification with, 49 Freud’s myth of, 6
and penis, Lacan’s theory of, 102– procreation and sexuality,
109 dissociation between, 9–12,
vs. penis, 13 81–83
primacy of, 41 projection, 3, 18, 24, 44, 145, 155,
as privileged signifier, 104 167
real [un phallus réel], 103 projective identification, 157, 186
as signifier, 13 psychic bisexuality, 5, 42, 44
of meaning, 108 psychic pain, 131, 166, 168
of sexual difference, 108 as failure of regulation, 146
of signification, 108 and finitude, 124
of symbolic law, 48 psychization, 43–46
transcendental, 108–109 early, 45
Philia [love], 59 of maternal object, 5, 44
Phillips, A., 131 sexual, 5
phobias, infant’s, 47 psychoanalysis and femininity
Pine, D., 195 theory, 12
Plato, 54, 60–61 psychology:
pleasure principle, failure of, 58 evolutionary, 178
polymorph, perverse, 43 male and female, 3
polymorphism, of individuals, 18, psychosexual cycle of life, 80
174 psychosexual development, 8
Portman Clinic, London, 34 female, 4, 41
post-menopausal woman, sexuality Freud’s theory of, 25, 98, 186
of, 73 psychosomatic development, 4
post-Saussurean linguistics, and puberty, 32, 73, 76, 86, 193
Lacan, 14, 94–96, 108–109, R
112, 116 Ragland-Sullivan, E., 128
post-Saussurean theory vs. post- Raphael-Leff, J., xiv
structuralist theory, 117 reactional femininity, 5, 47
post-structuralism, 112, 115, 181– Read, R., 131
182, 199 reality principle, 15, 119
linguistic foundations of, 117 receptivity, pleasurable, dimension
vs. post-Saussurean thought, 117 of, 163
power, male, 175 recognition:
power relations: failure of, 147
asymmetrical, and sexuality, 140 mutual, 165, 166, 167
and sexuality, 19, 176 Reich, W., 69
pregenital fantasies, unconscious, relationships, lateral vs. vertical, 75,
men’s projetion of onto 76
women, 3, 24 reparative fantasies, and sense of
pregnancy, 23, 57, 62, 81, 86, 187, 194 gender, 189
pre-oedipal society, 10 repetition compulsion, 7, 57, 58
INDEX 217
representation, theory of, vs. theory self-destructiveness and sense of

of language, 113 gender, 189
reproduction: self-recognition, and intersubjective
asexual, 74 moment, 176
human, 10 self-regulation, 147, 163
in psychoanalytic theory, 68 failure of, 146
sexed, 70 passivity as, 17
sexual, 10, 63, 70 sensoriality, polymorphous, of
vs. asexual, 8 primary oedipal phase, 49
and sexual difference, 67 separation anxiety, 60, 65
and sexuality, 74 sex:
reproductive drives, 193 assignment of, 83–84
reproductive fantasies, 72 as invention of society, 84
reproductive sexuality, 79 reassignment, surgical, 87, 89
reproductivity, 186, 193 as social construct, 86
development of, non- sexed ego, 10, 71
phallocentric, 198 sexed reproduction, 70–72
Richards, A., 191 sexes, anatomical difference
rights, inequality of, 80 between, 5, 13, 45, 103, 105–
Riviere, J., 28 106
Rogers, L. J., 175 sexism, 99, 124
Rosanvallon, P., 129 sexual development, 5
Rose, H., 174 final stage of, 82
Rose, J., 127, 129, 139 sexual difference, 20, 181–203
Rose, S., 174 anti-essentialist theory of, 103
Roudinesco, E., 128 concept of, 70
Rousseau, J. J., 122 vs. femininity, 13, 15, 96–97, 117
Rubin, G., 69, 179 Freud’s theory of, 3, 108
S vs. gender, 9–10, 67–78, 79–91,
sadomasochism, 35, 36, 168 186
Saladin d’Anglure, B., 83 importance of, 79, 80–81
same-sex, cross-generational Lacan’s theory of, 3, 95–135
relations, 20, 21, 181–203 morphological, 71, 103
Sander, L., 153 as trauma, 121
Sartre, J.-P., 137 sexual deviation(s):
Sausse, S. K., 129 in couples, 36
Say, G., 31 in women, 4, 33–36
Sayers, J., 75 sexual drive, 11, 19
scepticism as gendered, 113 sexuality:
Scott, J., 69, 128, 199 containing function of, 148
seduction: denial of, 20
as helplessness, 154 exploitation and power relations,
theory, 147 175
seductive mother, introjected, 5, 44 feminine component of, 53
Seelig, B., xiv gender organization of, 179
218 INDEX
sexuality (continued): responding to vs. altering, 174

human, polarization of, 179 Stoller, R., 35, 69, 82–84, 89, 148, 185,
infantile, 26, 42, 72–74, 82 199
lateral, 10, 76 Stone, M., 131
male, sexual perversion in, 4 structuralist anthropology, Lévi-
non-reproductive, 73, 75, 85 Straussian, 182
parental, 148 structuralist linguistics, Saussurean,
polymorphously perverse, 75 182
and power relations, 19 subjectivity:
and procreation, dissociation interactive, 5, 43–46
between, 9–12, 81–83 theory of, 138
psychoanalytic theory of, and subject–object relationship, 10
thought, 5, 47 sublimation, 31, 47, 50, 179
reproductive, 79 instinctual, 51
repudiation of, 10, 68 Sundén, M., xiv, xv
social representations of, 3, 23 superego, 47
theory vs. practice, 1 defects, of female, 27
and thought, 5, 47, 48 development, 95, 182
as vehicle of expression, 149 surrender:
and violence, 73 intersubjective, 168
sexual liberation, 3, 23 trauma, and third position, 165–
sexual orientation, 85 171
sexual passivity, 17, 146 symbiotic relationships, 5
sexual perversion, 4, 33–34 symbolic activity as phallic, 108
sexual relationships, plurality of, 75 symbolic discourse, 14
sibling(s), 67 symbolic function, 42
creation of, transsexuality as, 9 and social norms or ideology,
relationships, 10, 77 103
importance of, 9, 83, 85 symbolic law, privileged signifier
sexual, 67 of, 6
siblinghood, 70 symbols vs. bodies, 13
signifiers, enigmatic, 4 T
Silverman, K., 166–167, 176–177 “Tamara” [clinical example], 32–33
sister position, 158 Target, M., 65, 146
skin-ego, 43 tension:
Solberger, A., xv discharge of, 18–19
split, mind–body, 17, 150–152 bodily, in monadic economy,
split complementarity, 151, 155 152
splitting, 150, 155, 163 male, 154, 175
active/passive, 154, 157 of split-off experience, 150
and complementarity of gender, and virtue, 179
145 regulation, failure of, 147
Stein, A., 179 as source of pleasure, 164
Stein, R., 147, 148, 149 sustaining of, 164
stimulus(i): terrorism, psychodynamics of
dialectic approach to, 174 masculinity, 196
INDEX 219
Thanatos, 7–8, 57–60, 62–63 unconscious fantasy, maleness and

and separation, 8 femaleness in, 182
isolation, obsessional neurosis, V
masculinity, 62 vagina:
see also death drive perception of, 48
theory of representation, 113 as portal, 29
thirdness, 173 vaginal–anal femininity, 44
space of, 18, 165, 168 vaginal–cloacal mobilization, 5, 44
third position, 165 Varikas, E., 129
trauma and surrender, 165–171 Verhaeghe, P., xi, xiv, 6–10, 15, 53–66
third space, 19, 179 Viennot, E., 129
time, woman’s relationship to, 31– violence, 35, 76
32 and gender, 11, 68, 73
Tincq, H., 129 sexual, 141
Tort, M., 129 and sexuality, 73
transcendence, 93 W
transference, 116, 186, 189, 191, 199 Welldon, E., 34, 35
clinical, 72 wholeness, 7, 8
intrapsychic mother–daughter, original, 58
187 loss of, 8, 61
maleness and femaleness in, 182 Williams, C., 179
maternal, 186 Winnicott, D. W., 42, 85
transgendering, 67, 76–77, 122 Witt-Brattström, E., xii, xiv, 12, 15–
“transgenderism”, 87 16, 137–143
transsexuality/ism, 9, 12, 77, 80, 84, Wittgenstein, L., 13, 95–97, 112–117,
87–89, 121–122 121, 126, 130–131, 137
transvestism, 87, 122 Wolfe, S., 156
Trat, J., 129 woman/women:
trauma(s): men’s fear of, 3
childhood, 36 phallic masquerade of, 56
surrender, and third position, sexual deviation in, 4
165–171 theories of, and femininity and
universal, 3, 15, 118, 120–135 feminist theories, 137–143
traumatic neurosis, 58 unconscious desires and fantasies
Treut, M., 67, 87 of, 3
Triebmischung, 8, 60, 63 universality of as women, 138
Trigano, S., 129 Victorian, as model of femininity,
Turtle, G., 87 23
two-person economy, 152, 173, 179 women’s literature, 16, 139–142
two-person relationship, pleasure as literature of testimony, 141
and pain in, 17, 146 Wordsworth, W., 122
Tyson, P., 30 Y
U Yassa, M., xiv
unconscious, the: Z
Freud’s concept of, 3, 24 Zoë [eternal life], 59, 63
repressed fantasies in, 24 see also Eros; life drive

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EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ix

JESSICA BENJAMIN, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, is

COLETTE CHILAND is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst at the Paris Psy-

NANCY J. CHODOROW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in

GISELA KAPLAN, originally from Berlin, is now research professor at

JULIA KRISTEVA is a professor at Paris 7 (linguistics and literature), a

IRÉNE MATTHIS is professor of psychoanalysis and assistant professor

(2000); “Finger-twisting and Cracked Voices: The Hysterical Symp-

JOYCE MCDOUGALL, born in New Zealand, received her psychoana-

JULIET MITCHELL is professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies in

TORIL MOI is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance

PAUL VERHAEGHEis full professor at the University of Gent, Belgium,

Feminine (1997), Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and

EBBA WITT-BRATTSTRÖM is professor of comparative literature and

the conference a success, and I warmly thank Christina Flordh,

Dialogues on sexuality and gender

Freud and female sexualities (Joyce McDougall). There are con-

sexuality might have been misconstrued, she writes, but he was

perspective, Freud missed an aspect that was especially important

Primary and secondary oedipal phases (Julia Kristeva). The Oedi-

become important in the sexual development of men as well as

dynamic—in both sexes. There is a phallic pleasure in the access to

On binary oppositions (Paul Verhaeghe). Kristeva’s writings con-

The binary reasoning often induces problematic analogies. The

Finally, Verhaeghe stresses that the relationship between the

The difference between sexuality and procreation (Juliet Mitchell;

difference. This area of “gender” is the area of sexual drive. Sexual

the interpretations of these in various societies. Consequently, she

What kind of gender theories does psychoanalysis need? (Toril Moi;

Lacan, but by Simone de Beauvoir in particular, and, finally, by

term has many more meanings. It also implies femaleness, which

phrase she herself uses in her introduction to The Kristeva Reader

“castration” was a problematic word, but some thought “finitude”

and that they look at men as marked just as much by particularity

An intersubjective approach (Jessica Benjamin; discussant: Gisela

Discharge, which Benjamin links to a one-person economy in

She believes that this has a bearing on Benjamin’s exposition of

A viewpoint from the clinical scene (Nancy J. Chodorow). In the

with generational relationships (the Oedipus complex differs for

The perspective of Horney, Kestenberg, and others that estab-

Some final words

2. Reports from Group 1 (Cecilia Annell) and Group 6 (Harriet Bjerrum

Freud and female sexualities

However, coming now to the unconscious, we still find re-

description from the New Introductory Lectures, published in 1933,

nalizing a symbolic representation of the complementarity of the

Female body image

psychic representation of them, particularly since she has difficulty

Masturbation and femininity

Woman and time

As Helene Deutsch pointed out long ago: puberty and meno-

Sexuality and creativity

“Tamara”, a talented violinist, suffered such paralysing anxiety

In the sessions that followed we came to understand that,

Sexual deviations in women