ABSTRACT

Sigmund Freud wrote that if the inhabitant of some other planet were to arrive on earth, what would most astonish him would doubtless be sexual difference. The present question goes beyond the domain of feminine sexuality to centre on femininity, understood in its double reference to man and woman. Hitherto included within the great problem of bisexuality, femininity shows enough singular characteristics for us to consider it separately—or perhaps, more correctly, for us to use it as the basis to re-centre the question of bisexuality. Since the aim of analysts' work is to explore the place of the sexual in contemporary psychoanalysis, there is no question of re-writing the record of the debates held within psychoanalysis, in which Freud, his disciples and his successors took various sides. This generalisation of Freud, if it acknowledges the place of defences in masculine conceptions of the feminine, is no less injurious to women, since it proposes something still harder to accept—the rejection by woman of her oum sex.