ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about the connection between the question of femininity and the construction of psychoanalytic theory. But the question of sexual difference – femininity and masculinity – was built into the very structure of the illness. But while bisexuality explained why men and women could be hysterics, it did not account for why it was their femininity that was called into play. And yet – with all the difference in the world – in Sigmund Freud's theory, libido remains 'masculine' and it is not that repression is feminine, but that femininity is repudiated. For Freud the final formation of the human psyche is coincident with the psychological acquisition of the meaning of sexual difference. Freud talks of splitting where Klein perceives 'split-off parts' which can be communicated to the analyst by projection. Freud's theory is a myth, a story of a story – the subject's narrative structuring of him – or herself.
