ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the impact of desexualization of the maternal on the development of female sexuality. A “chance encounter” revealing a desire in the female analyst, previously unsuspected, disrupts a female patient’s prior sense of homoerotic immersion with the analyst. The analyst’s desire for someone other than the patient was a passion unforeseen and most definitely unwelcome. It is argued that a girl’s would-be oedipal competition is encased within a patriarchal structuring of sexuality where the mother is rendered solely reproductive and nurturing, not erotically sexual. The chapter examines the meanings for a patient of internalizing a female figure, her analyst, who is viewed as both maternal and sexual. The author suggests that a female sense of genital inadequacy and inferiority may have a component of not being able to link the mother’s (and in the transference, the analyst’s) use of her genitals with her use of her mind/maternal function. It is the absence of the erotic mother–a sexual contender in her own right, functioning as a third–that distorts the daughter’s oedipal story.
