Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne

by Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell (Editor), Jacqueline Rose (Editor)

Jacques Lacan is arguably the most controversial psychoanalyst of our time. Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the école freudienne , the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980.

The question of feminine sexuality has divided the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and privilege but as the terms through which any such privilege is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category "woman" as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy, Academic, Feminism

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 1985

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Анна · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slogged thru this mess throughout my 14 hour layover incidentally operated by Air France and have come to two personal conclusions.
1) The legacy of Jacques Lacan is more of a signifier of crude French chauvinism now than the sum of his oeuvre in contribution to the whole "return to Freud" school of psychoanalysis.
I should've figured that an obfuscationist pervert WOULD be an endogenous pop culture figure like Tupac to the French, and yet I was still offended to have been interrupted by so many French, then broken-English, nods of approval.
2) I'm not too stupid after all and Écrits IS mostly nonsense; 60 pages of external introduction followed up by as many pages of the primary source has confirmed my apriori suspicion that most contemporary Lacan "scholars" are just losers dickriding a guy who *seems* too cool to be fraudulent so he must not be.
Enough

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The four stars are mostly for the two critical introductions: they are simply excellent.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

he is kind a funny

[Tom Syverson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a valuable read for intermediate students of Lacan. You should be well versed in his basics in terms of sexuality and desire, as these texts will likely be too difficult to just walk blindly into. As Bruce Fink has noted, you really need to know what Lacan means before you read him saying it.

The first two introductory essays are fantastic, but mostly just set up the "problem of femininity" in the history of psychoanalysis. In fact, most of the book is dedicated to wrestling with, to no real end, the problem, rather than discussing possible solutions. It's not until you get into the last two chapters, later seminars from Lacan, that you really begin to find any answers. The book is neatly organized to show the evolution of Lacan's approach to sexual difference; from being versus having, to the formulas of sexuation, and finally to woman as symptom. We're never quite satisfied with Lacan's account of sexual difference (or with anyone's, for that matter), but a big part of this book is dedicated to showing precisely why that is the case.

As a broader comment on Lacan, the first thing to understand is that his work is not really meant to be understood.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of interesting layers to this one. I guess the whole point was, love isn’t about sex, but definitely a language game- and in some ways is even more real than gender.

[Rosa Junnila · Rating 4 out of 5]

started out ok, but the last chapter was def my fave , but i found the constant circling back to the castration complex annoying