You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
An original and critical thinker, Silvia Bleichmar advocated that we update some of our central psychoanalytic concepts to better understand the clinical cases we deal with today.1 In this book, her last, she argued that the concept of castration should not be seen as the mere lack of a penis. That, she thought, was an infantile sexual theory elaborated by a
psychoanalysis born out of the subjectivity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead she emphasized the ontological character of “absence” as an intrinsic part of human nature.
In the book she also sought to overcome the impasse created by the idea that the feminine psychosexual constitution is consolidated following a series of difficult movements involving erogenous zones and changes of object, as against the idea that masculine psychosexuality is built on a continuity in which the mother, as sexual object, is held on to from the beginning of life. She argued instead that the mother figure that exists before the discovery of anatomical differences is not the same mother who will become the object of oedipal desire. The former is endowed with attributes of “wholeness” that are destroyed with the narcissistic fallout and the acceptance of the object's limitations. Moreover, for Bleichmar the other important variable in this process is the appearance of the “sexuated” father. The boy who has discovered the anatomical differences must learn of the existing relationship between the mother, object of his love and desire, and the father, owner of the sexual attribute that identifies him as his male offspring. Thus, for Bleichm