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This evening's panel engaged the issue of female desire and sexuality from various relational, cultural, feminist, and intrapsychic views. Panelists addressed the particulars of female aggression, embodiment and the cultural expectations of desire in the lives of women, having given consideration to the area of women's sexuality by elaborating on the developmental issues that contribute to the integration, owning, and disowning of women's desire. In addition, the panel focused on the ways that cultural influences may prescribe or determine what is considered “normal” or pathological female sexuality.
The evening's first speaker was Velleda Ceccoli whose paper, titled “Entwinements: The Construction of Desire Between Women,” aimed to address the work of analysis with women by women, “particularly as regards the construction, elaboration and integration of female desire.” Ceccoli centered her discussion on the ways in which desire and sexuality develop vis-à-vis relationships and interactions with other women intergenerationally, intrapsychically, socially and quite importantly via the “maternal function.” Much of Ceccoli's presentation spoke to the ways that women in general and women analysts in particular act as vehicles for the “containment and processing of aggression, envy, hate and love.”
Ceccoli stressed the vital role that “mother” has in forming a girl's/woman's sense of herself as the embodiment of being female. She spoke of the ways in which the seeds of female sexuality and eroticism are planted through the bond between mother and daughter, a relationship that is powerful, seductive, specially languaged verbally and nonverbally, embodied in the physicality of each participant, and bringing with it an “illusion of similarity,” all of which implode upon one's self-definition of being woman. It is this maternal connection that continues to impact the ways that women negotiate desire, sexuality, aggression, love, hatred, one's subjectivity, and, taken together,