ABSTRACT
The idealisation of an absent father lies at the heart of femininity. The girl finds herself trapped in a bad relationship with the mother or step-mother, who attempts to kill her or to poison her, or who treats her with contempt and cruelty. The path to the development of femininity now lies open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not restricted by the remains of the pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother which she has surmounted. A woman’s struggle with the mother continues throughout life in a way that is immediate than that of a man, because it is not repressed but is bound up with the core of her femininity and her capacity to produce children. Sigmund Freud’s theory of femininity can be read as the attempt of a whole culture to limit this invidious invasion of early mother, by making of her an object out of a subject, and turning her omnipotence into a riddle.
