Is Anatomy Destiny? Metapsychological Proposals on the Femininity of Women

≪It is […] in the “childish organism” that this knowledge is accumulated and expressed -a bedrock of “experience” which charges the most adventurous theories with a weighty truth. Childhood theories are therefore the structure superimposed on the bodily experience which represents its “origin”. The body provides theory with its basis of truth≫ writes Assoun (1997, my translation).

In putting forward these thoughts I find myself in agreement with certain premises that Assoun's sentence puts so succinctly. It seems to me that Assoun provides a fruitful synthesis of Freud's legacy with regard to the mind-body relation. Such a view highlights how the instinctual body is an irreducible element, a ≪basis of truth≫, for childhood sexual theories. However, at the same time, it does not ignore that this selfsame instinctual body also imposes a boundary upon the phantasies to which the polyhedral nature of the mind lends its ≪body≫. I will come back to this point later.

For the moment I would like to re-propose the fateful and well-known question that Freud put forward with regard to the secret of femininity.

≪What does a woman want?≫

Both theoretical tradition and the ‘dark continent’ itself make this a difficult question, even for women.

However, I will attempt to offer a provisional answer without necessarily falling back upon the area of the maternal, as so many psycho-analytical responses have done. Not that I do not believe that this maternal aspect is of fundamental importance for female identity. In fact, in the near future I aim to go beyond the Freudian cliché of motherhood as a transformation of the original masculinity (with penis envy being centre focus) and the Kleinian notion of the child-breast-penis-faeces equivalence (as interchangeable objects of the mother's internal body), to investigate the intuitions regarding this matter put forward by a pioneer of psycho-analysis, Mack Brunswick (1940),