Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views

233 Pages·1991·29.591 MB·English

by  Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

ARESF1ELD
LIBRARY
J A N I N E

C H A S S E G U E T -

S M I R G E L

female

sexuality

new psychoanalytic views
KARNAC
Female Sexuality

Female Sexuality

NEW PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWS
By Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
with
C.-J. Luquet-Parat, B£la Grunberger,
Joyce McDougall, Maria Torok, Christian David
Foreword by Frederick Wyatt
MARESFIELD LIBRARY
KARNAC BOOKS
LONDON
English translation copyright © 1970
by The University of Michigan.
Reprinted in this edition 1985
by H. Karnac (Books) Ltd,
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
by special arrangement with the
University of Michigan Press
Reprinted 1988
Reprinted 1992
ISBN 978 ο 946439 14 ο
First published as Recherches psychoanaiytiques nouvelks
sur la sexualiU fiminine.
© Copyright 1964 by Payot, Paris. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, ig28-
Female sexuality: new psychoanalytic views.— (Marcsfield library).
1. Women. Sexuality—Psychoanalytical perspectives
I. Title II. Luquet-Parat, C. F. (Catherine F.)
III. Rechercher psychoanaiytiques nouvelles sur la
scxualite feminine. English
"55-3'33
ISBN 978-0-946439-14-0
Printed in Great Britain by BPC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter
Foreword
Frederick Wyatt
Considering the amount of time human beings commonly spend on
the twin subjects of love and sex, one might think that psychology
would, as a matter of course, regard them as its foremost concern.
But this is not so. We have more systematic knowledge of the mat­
ing behavior of most animals than of the analogous enterprise in
man. So much of the latter is mental, that is, subjectively experi­
enced as impulse and affect, and mostly enjoined by fantasy. It goes
on either without any corollary behavior, or with widely divergent
ones. It is not surprising, then, that the literary imagination has
dealt so often with the varieties of love, but we still have reason to
wonder how psychology managed until recently to have so little to
say about i t
One of the abiding contributions of psychoanalysis to the
human condition is, indeed, that it finally came to grips with the
subject, providing us with a systematic theory of sexual develop­
ment. Psychoanalysis for the first time put some order into the pro­
fusion of sexual aims and their possible objects, showing us how
they derive from a plural convergence between the child's in­
stinctual needs and fantasies, his inherent individual dispositions,
and the pressures of his environment.
Psychoanalysis had less to say about love. Even if it is not
considered a subject too sublime for it (as some critics have main­
tained), it will not be grasped either if regarded merely as a by­
product of sexuality, a kind of sentimentalized decoy for a gullible
public, as some psychoanalysts hold. There is no principal reason
why love can not be understood within the scope of psychoanaly­
sis. What psychoanalysts will then have to say about it may still not
be as uncannily perceptive as poets and writers so often have been;
but, by proceeding more systematically, psychoanalysis might give
us at last a more comprehensive and steady understanding of the
subject than we have had so far.
Vi F E M A L E SEXUALITY
However, no psychology of love is without a psychology of
sex. The involvement of the sexes and the subterfuges and inver­
sions of this involvement have been commonly discussed by psy­
choanalysts in terms of instinctual needs and their arrest and dis­
tortion through conflict. The development of male sexuality was
studied first, and perhaps for that reason as well as because of its
relative simplicity, it became a model for all subsequent investiga­
tion. Freud's one-sided approach to the psychology of women has
been criticized so much that it will be in order here to reflect on
what the situation now is. Those familiar with the literature know,
of course, that major revisions of Freud's view on female sexuality
have already taken place. Further revisions are needed. There are
simply too many facets in the psychology of woman which are not
yet sufficiently understood. As clinicians we meet continuously with
breaks and discontinuities of the life history too readily put down
as symptoms. Sometimes we can seize upon some of their meaning
intuitively, but we cannot consistently fit them into our conceptual
framework and so explain them. The endless ambiguities of women
with regard to themselves belong here—the common envy of the
male's prerogatives and of his presumable advantages. We are con­
tinuously struck by the greater psychological vulnerability of
women, strangely coupled with greater biological sturdiness, and by
the very widespread disabilities in sexual responsiveness. All these
features create a penumbra of problems both personal and social
which is not lighted up by insisting that we have already a com­
plete theory to provide all the answers. Freud's writings on the
subject, in spite of some jostling with female psychoanalytic critics,
leave no doubt that he was fully aware of the limits of his own
explanations. Of course, we do not help matters either if we dismiss
psychoanalytic propositions about feminine sexuality altogether.
No better theory is in sight anywhere, and the promise of the psy­
choanalytic approach is so obvious and in so many respects not yet
realized that we should first of all strive to work it out. The point
now is to explore and vary our frame of reference systematically.
We may well have carried along a set of theoretical expectations,
a grid for the ordering of our observations, which from time to
time detracts us from links and patterns of development which may
yet lead to more effective explanations. What is needed, then, is a
willingness to alter viewpoints. To provide us with such a change
in perspective is the prominent contribution of this book.
The divergence of this book from the classical psychoanalytic
position can be schematically stated in this way: the authors agree
on the overwhelming importance of the mother for the personality
Foreword vii
and later sexual adjustment of the little girl. The significance of
this early relationship can best be demonstrated by its failures and
by the pathological twists following upon them. In these instances
the child has never succeeded in freeing herself from the mother.
At least in her own perception of herself she has remained be­
holden to her. In effect she thinks of herself as merely a part of
the mother's body, or total presence, and must not have wishes and
an individuality of her own. The various pathologies of which the
authors offer impressive case examples represent attempts of the
girl, now grown into womanhood, to free herself from the image of
that possessive but often unprepossessing mother. Appropriate to
the origin of that image are the girl's attempts at overcoming it —
they are, as a rule, as devious and irrational as they are futile and
self-limiting.
In their conception of the impact and scale of these events
in early childhood the authors tend toward the views developed by
Melanie Klein and frequently promulgated by Ernest Jones. Ac­
cording to this position the drama of early childhood goes on very
much inside, consisting as it does of fantasies insinuating the
usurpation of genitals and other properties of the parents' bodies,
and of the guilt the child accumulates by participating in these
games in his imagination.
Melanie Klein's ideas have had much less influence on the
development of psychoanalysis in this country than they continue
to have in England, in France, and, for that matter, in South Amer­
ica. The question at this point cannot be whether they are right
or not. Being reconstructions rather than propositions based on
readily accessible observation, they are not verifiable in the strict
sense of the word. They must be judged, above all, in terms of
what they can do for us by enabling us to organize observations
in a novel and productive way. The authors of Female Sexuality
show what use can be made of the Klein-Jones frame of reference
by demonstrating its efficacy in the organization of clinical ma­
terials and in the formulation of productive hypotheses. They
throw light on some of the perennial queries of the clinical investi­
gator and therapist concerning that ubiquitous and much debated
motif penis envy, on the stuff of which men and women make up
their fantasies of each other, on the rather universal roots of female
homosexuality, and on many other topics.
This book differs not only in its conceptual framework, but
in its emphasis on what in the psychoanalytic image of man matters
most. It stresses primary process, impulse, and affect before ego or­
ganization. There is in this way not much room for the autonomy
Viil F E M A L E SEXUALITY
of the ego, which for many of us has become the center of psycho­
analytic theory. Nevertheless, the authors of this book again vigor­
ously remind us of what can still be gained from expanding on
psychoanalysis's earlier stress on instinct and the unconscious. The
authors are by no means unaware of the collective behind the in­
dividual—of the motive-orienting force of culture and social norms,
and their indispensable part in the reconstruction of normal and
pathological developments. T o advance our understanding of the
casting of the sexes we shall have to draw much more on anthro­
pology and sociology—and ethology—than we have done so far.
But that is the prospect for psychoanalytic psychology at large. The
merit of the studies assembled in thii book seems to me to consist
in organizing observations more comprehensively and with fewer
strings left dangling than before. It consists in answering some
questions and in cutting back others to essentials, so that the prob­
lem can be approached more efficiently in the next round. The
authors of this book suggest new ways of looking at an age-old
problem, and in doing so give us also a welcome demonstration
of the French point of view in psychoanalysis. The reader who
follows their exposition with an open mind will find the excursion
most rewarding.
Contents
Introduction. J . Chasseguet-Smirgel /

A Masculine Mythology of Femininity. C. David 47

Outline for a Study of Narcissism in Female Sexuality.

B. Grunberger 68

The Change of Object. C. Luquet-Parat 84

Feminine Guilt and the Oedipus Complex.

J . Chasseguet-Smirgel 94

The Significance of Penis Envy in Women. M . Torok /55

Homosexuality in Women. J. McDougall 171

Notes 213