ABSTRACT
Some Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality is a crucial hinge paper on Lacan’s thinking on sexual difference and female sexuality in the late fifties. While the text is part of a larger project of interpreting Freud’s work by ascribing a linguistic structure to the unconscious, there are clear links to be found to his later elaboration of the petit object a in the sixties and his work in the seventies explicitly devoted to sexuation and to the elaboration of feminine and masculine structure. This chapter considers in depth the dimensions of female desire and jouissance, the castration complex, paternal metaphor and the phallus at the centre of subjectivity and in the role and function of female sexuality. It elaborates three configurations of female sexuality – frigidity, heterosexual femininity and homosexuality, which follows Freud’s three modes of femininity. As well as reassessing the role of the female body in sexual difference, other themes include masochism, erotomania, and love. The chapter also considers the status of women in the social arena and critiques how female sexuality and the “object” has been defined by psychoanalytic doctrine and the role of phantasy in these considerations.
