24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
Lacan's remarks on woman and on feminine sexuality have become the focus of controversy and debate in feminist theory. Feminists have divided over whether to see Lacan as an ally or an enemy of the feminist cause. Some have seen his theories as providing an incisive description of patriarchy and as a way of challenging fixed concepts of sexual identity.<ref>e.g. Mitchell and Rose, 1982</ref> Others have argued that his concept of the symbolic order reinstates patriarchy as a transhistorical given, and that his privileging of the phallus simply repeats the alleged misogynies of Freud himself.<ref>e.g. Gallop, 1982; Grosz, 1990</ref>
=Freudian Dictionary=
<blockquote>.... the female sex, the sex certainly more predisposed to neurosis .... It is precisely in the female that object loss seems to remain the most effective situation of danger .... Since it is certainly true that hysteria has a greater affinity with femininity, just as compulsion neurosis has with masculinity, the idea suggests itself that, as a determinant of anxiety, loss of love plays a role in hysteria similar to that of the threat of castration in the phobias and of dread of the superego in compulsion neurosis.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 8</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>We attribute to women a greater amount of narcissism (and this influences their object-choice) so that for them to be loved is a stronger need than to love. Their vanity is partly a further effect of penis-envy, for they are driven to rate their physical charms more highly as a belated compensation for their original sexual inferiority. Modesty, which is regarded as a feminine characteristic par excellence, but is far more a matter of convention than one would think, was, in our opinion, originally designed to hide the deficiency in her genitals.<ref>{{NILP}} Ch. 5</ref></blockquote>
{{Freudian Dictionary}}
