ABSTRACT
Feminist explorations of Freud’s conception of femininity always seem to run up against some bedrock or impasse which means that the hypothetical woman ends up forever out of sight. Either she is long buried in the ruins of a Minoan-Mycenaean past, unable to take any part in the modern world, or else she has got herself lost on the way by taking one of the roads marked out for the man she can never be. One way or the other, she is divided between masculine and feminine identities, unable to settle with either, since neither is simply available for her taking. Wherever we look in Freud’s discussions of femininity, the same difficulty seems to emerge, as though from a rock formation so deeply embedded that it would take something like a volcanic eruption to shift it.
