Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne - Softcover

Jacques Lacan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393302113 ISBN 13: 9780393302110

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. His many published works include Ecrits and The Seminars.

JACQUELINE ROSE is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision; The Question of Zion ; and the novel Albertine.

JACQUELINE ROSE is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision; The Question of Zion ; and the novel Albertine.

Language Notes:

Text: English, French (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0393302113
• ISBN 13: 9780393302110
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose