In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Two What Does a Woman Enjoy? Colette's Le pur et l'hnpur Toward the end of his career, Freud famously told his one-time analysand, then friend and benefactress, Marie Bonaparte,1 that the most important question for psychoanalysis was the one he had not been able to answer throughout all his research and practice: "The great question, which has never been answered and which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?"'2 This oft-quoted question defines the problem of sexual difference as synonymous with that posed by Woman's difference frOJn Man. Her desire, as opposed to his, isa puzzle. And the reason for which her desire is a mystery is, as we have seen with Lacan and Irigaray, that her existence itself needs to be accounted for. If "femininity" is Freud's question in the essay of the same name, for example, it is indistinguishable from the question of how it is that out of a "bisexual" child a feminine woman can develop instead of a masculine man: how it is that there can be a she, instead of a he ("Femininity ," SE 22: 119). The well-known maleness of this bisexual child is Freud's fundamental and, for him, invisible obstacle to accounting for the feminine difference he seeks to illuminate. As soon as the little girl is understood to be a little man, it is impossible to come up with a plausible reason why she would not continue in her manliness (attachl11ent to the mother, "phallic " aggressivity, etc.). To explain the girl's tum to girl-ness, and then womanhood (neurotic, masculine, or normal), frol11 little man-ness, Freud·finds that he is obliged to ground himself on the very anatomy he began by saying could offer no solution to the question of the difference between men and women. "After all," Freud writes, betraying, perhaps, a sense of defeat in the face of the apparently overwhelming force that 87 Chapter Two the having and not having of a penis carries, "After all, the anatomical distinction [between the sexes] must express itself in psychical consequences" ("Femininity," SE 22: 124; Stradley's brackets, emphasis added). Nowhere else in Freud do we find this particular must, this quality of necessity in the relation of the body to the psyche. Most often things are quite the opposite , and Freud is warning us (in the same essay in fact) not to assume a one-to-one correspondence between them; and reminding us, again in "Femininity," that it is fantasy that is sure to leave permanent traces in the mind, while the material of bodily experience is subject to an infinite range of interpretations and outcOlnes for the psyche. Here, though, the actual superiority of the condition of being male unmistakably informs his judgment. The little girl is immediately upset that she has been given inferior equipment. For Freud there is little, or at any rate insufficient, doubt that her physical difference will from the first be perceived as less than, worse than, and to confirm this, if he needed to, he might simply ask anyone to look around at others who are similarly (un)equipped ("Femininity ," SE 22: 125), and also curbed, ruled over, trained to suppress their own inlpulses. The fact that Freud is ineluctably influenced by the states of women and men in the world in which he lived, and by all of the assumptions about the natures of each that went along with these states is the ground both of penis envy's dubiousness (a dubiousness that he himself acknowledges in another essay3) and its radical potential as a concept. For if the phenomenon of penis envy in female infantile psychical development is either nonexistent or not necessarily existent (and thus not the thing that will explain the tum from the Inother, the identification with the father, and later, a preponderance of jealousy, envy, depression in the female psyche), it is nonetheless indisputable that women are "complaining," falling ill, and that their illnesses are indeed intimately bound up with the relation between two opposite, opposed sexes. While little girls may not be getting upset as a result of a protuberance of flesh they see on some beings, but only on SOlne, and not on themselves, they are nevertheless getting upset, and by precisely those "social customs," that "suppression of women's aggressiveness [...] imposed on them socially" to which Freud...

Share