ABSTRACT
My focus has really been on the “storm” of the last century in the psychoanalytic literature on female sexuality and an opportunity that was missed or avoided at the end of it when biology offered a re-interpretation of the structure of the clitoris. There have been some developments in the general field of female sexuality in the literature since the millennium, though an impression is that it seems quieter. The familiar dynamic continues, of the subject seeming to disappear only to re-emerge later. My hypothesis is that this links to the character of the female genitalia, hidden and potentially frightening. But women analysts have been meeting in international groups and producing edited volumes. Examples are: Studies on Femininity, edited by Alizade (2003); Motherhood, edited by Cheshire (2007); and The Female Body, edited by Moeslein-Teising and Thomson Salo (2013). These books have emerged from the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP). Rosine Perelberg has been organizing a series of conferences on sexuality in the UK recently with an emphasis on female sexuality. Journal representation has been particularly quiet, except for a notable contribution in the dedication of much of an edition of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2003) to women, where many of the contemporary names in the American field, 102Tyson, Holtzman and Kulish, Balsam, Chodorow, and Kramer Richards feature. Rosemary Balsam’s book Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012) has been extensively reviewed, and I counted six different ones.
