ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the centrality of the Freudian psychoanalytic understanding of sexual difference and the mode of its internalization, highlighting the role of the castration complex in psychic structuring. Through their writings, Gregorio Kohon and Juliet Mitchell elaborate Jacques Lacan's reading of Sigmund Freud's theory of female sexuality and sexual difference for an Anglo-Saxon readership. Invoking the Freudian tenet that theorizing is intertwined with the vicissitudes of the drive, Mitchell explores hysteria and theories of female sexuality in relation to the construction of psychoanalytic theory itself. Mitchell notes that the change of emphasis away from sexual difference to female sexuality during those debates reflected some of Freud's colleagues' rejection of the castration complex. The universal repudiation of femininity, of the space marking the absent penis, and of passivity, Freud saw as the psychic bedrock in men and women, pointing to the limits of psychoanalysis.
