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One cannot return to the question of sexual difference without something of a sigh. What more, one wonders, could possibly be said? Sexual difference is so deeply rooted in Freudian thought that to be Freudian at all—and on this matter, being Freudian includes being Lacanian, or Kleinian, or any other such adherence—is to commit to that difference's reality, or at least to its importance. Accordingly, many people, including a great many queer people, who have refused thus to be committed (in more ways than one) have found themselves obliged to become critics of the whole Freudian enterprise. Leaving the house of Oedipus behind them, they have shaken its ancient dust from their sandals, with good reason.
It is no surprise, therefore, that those of us who left matters thus with Freud return, if ever, without much nostalgia, at least at first. We have seen the world in the interim, and what once seemed a palace now looks rather more like a Viennese period room in a dusty museum whose visitors grow older and rarer by the year. Still, like the journey home that one must make to settle the affairs of a dead parent, perhaps after decades of estrangement, this one brings more to life than we expected—not just things we have forgotten entirely, but things we have misremembered and even one or two that we never knew.
Take sexual difference. It is not quite right to say that Freud largely founds our psychic lives upon such. The hypothesized foundation is, instead and quite plainly, our knowledge of sexual difference. To be sure, our acquisition of that knowledge is presented as so automatic as to amount to little more than the activation of the inevitable. Still, grounding the psyche in thinking about the body is not the same as grounding it in the body itself—a difference that later would enable the bolder deracinations and reformulations of Lacan. Why, then, have
Freud's critics tended to misremember him as reifier of sexed bodies? Certain notorious episodes of his early cl