ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book opens, in fact, with an introduction by Chasseguet-Smirgel in which she provides an overview of the psychoanalytic literature on the subject. The book also contains papers by eminent members of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society: Catherine J. Luquet-Parat, Bela Grunberger, Joyce McDougall, Maria Torok and Christian David. Thus it was that male and female analysts came together to review the work that had been done on female sexuality from Freud onwards. In the examples she gives, McDougall speculates on what it means to be 'normal' on the psychoanalytic stage: she argues that 'normality' can never be an analytic concept. French psychoanalysts have made an important contribution to this debate, particularly with the publication in 1964 of a book, which has since become a classic edited by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel: Recherches psychanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualite feminine.
