ABSTRACT
Ernest Jones, although he was a faithful and indefatigable proponent of psychoanalysis, disagreed with Sigmund Freud's ideas about female sexuality, especially with the notion that female sexuality develops from a masculine libido. This led him to propose that female sexuality was essentially different from male sexuality, that there was not one originally common libido, and that female development depended on, amongst other things, the apprehension of sensations arising from the female genital organs, particularly the vagina. Jones develops in an even starker way the notions of repressed desire for and identification with the father. Although at the beginning of his article he notes the 'phallocentric' bias of Freud's theory of female sexuality, this does not prevent him from conceptualising female homosexuality almost entirely in terms of the penis or its absence, the father and men in general.
