ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways that gender affects self-constituting activity. Much psychoanalytic theory today still minimizes the problem of gender. The question of woman in psychoanalysis involves not only accounting for the path of feminine development but also exploring sexual difference and the validity of the masculine model of selfhood as the model. A theory of self that takes gender seriously makes problematic the norm for "mature" selfhood. Feminists interested in developing Lacan's work have emphasized that according to him both men and women are castrated. The feminine self-strategy is less subjected to the Symbolic and the paternal law and more inclined toward "Imaginary" fusion than the masculine self-strategy. The masculine strategy denies the loss of mother-fusion and continues to evade confronting it by finding Symbolic substitutes that forever defer satisfaction. The shadowy reflections of mother-fusion are relegated to the unconscious and denied, to be replaced with the clear-cut categories and interdictions of the Symbolic order.
