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Why Do Women Love Men and Not Their Mothers? reconstructs a fertile period in the history of psychoanalysis, the time between about 1920 and 1933 when Freud's colleagues debated his theories of female development. Rereading Freud's papers and those of his contemporaries, tracing back and forth the borrowings of one paper from another, Marie-Christine Hamon exposes hidden dialogues, contributions integrated in one way or another into Freud's thinking and many ideas relegated to the dustbin of his disapproval. She conveys the power of Freud's influence and the tensions within his circle.
Hamon was curious to know how the clinical observations of Freud's contemporaries aided him in what she sees as his passage from “uncertainty” in the seminal papers written from 1923 to 1925, to “confidence” in 1931 and 1933. As late as 1920, Freud assumed a simple parallel between the oedipal complexes of boys and girls, the little girl naturally desiring her father and hating her mother as her rival in love. By 1925, he had reorganized his theory of the girl's entry into the oedipus complex as a function of her discovery of the “fact” of her castration. Much about the girl's preoedipal attachment to her mother remained obscure to him, though, because his male gender tended to bias the transferences toward him. Several years later, with the publication of the 1931 and 1933 papers on female sexuality, Hamon finds everything formulated earlier about “the girl's phallic activity and her penis envy … reaffirmed, but reordered as a function of the mother”; in order to love men, girls must renounce “a virility that from the outset belongs to them as much as it does to boys,” and, like boys, girls must give up their first love object. As with boys, the shift toward the father occurs only with the recognition of the mother's castration (pp. 1-2).
Hamon reads the papers written by Freud and his associates through the lens of Lacan's formulations. Her assessments of the contributions of so many