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Paradoxically, psychoanalysis seems to be rediscovering the psychological impact of the father and sexual difference via perversion, itself constituted by disavowal of their significance. Or so Paris-based psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall and US psychotherapist Louise Kaplan claim.
Both thereby draw on Freud's account of perversion, at least fetishism, as originating in the boy's use of an object to stand in for the mother's missing penis which otherwise seems to signify threat of his masturbation being punished with castration by the father. McDougall and Kaplan, however, reinterpret her lack in post-Freudian terms - as signifying not threat but the place where the father's penis comes into its ‘true phallic function’. It thereby disabuses the child of the illusion of itself completing the mother's desire - an illusion fostered by prior failure to negotiate pre-Oedipal issues of maternal separation and loss, and by the mother herself in so far as she belittles the father.
McDougall describes in these terms her patient, Professor K's compulsively repeated scenario involving beating his girlfriend's bare bottom. Not only were her genitals thus concealed. He also eluded sexual difference by himself commandeering the roles of both father and mother (symbolised by whip and buttocks). McDougall describes lesbianism in similar terms - as involving identification with the father in order both to escape an orally devouring and anally controlling mother, and to realise her idealised counterpart in a female lover. All too often, says McDougall, this involves self-demeaning identification with a denigrated image of the father, as repository of oral and anal impulses otherwise evoked by the mother. Better far, she goes on, to have positive internalisation of mother and parental couple. How else does one achieve the erotic cathexis of one's body necessary to masturbation and its creation of the illusion of hermaphroditism in the transitional space between the ideal of narcissistic se