ABSTRACT
Women ‘frequently do not feel whole, we feel undeserving and fraudulent
in significant ways’, the feminist psychotherapists Susie Orbach and Luise
Eichenbaum claimed in 1987, while fifty years earlier Freud had described
how all women develop a sense of inferiority ‘like a scar’ (Eichenbaum and
Orbach 1987: 56, Freud 1925: 337). That women somehow become
bruised and scarred by the process of becoming female has been an ongoing
theme within psychoanalytic theorising, although the ways the process has
been understood have often been very different.
