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When, in Eyes Wide Shut, Dr Harford lectures his wife that sexuality does not enter his medical consulting room, and that neither he nor his women patients become distracted by sexual thoughts, she advises him that ‘men don't know what women think’ and proves it by revealing her own erotic reveries about another man.
The enigma of ‘woman’ has never ceased to puzzle both men and women. Freud encountered it in the shape of one of his early patients, Ida Bauer, known as Dora. Treating her for hysterical symptoms Freud mistook her quest for the essence of femininity for a repressed wish to find fulfilment through a man, a misunderstanding that she commented on by abruptly leaving the treatment. Freud's subsequent inquiries into the question of femininity were firmly based on the understanding that it is not anatomy that defines men and women; but what positively marks the difference between the sexes is more difficult to specify. For Freud sexual difference evolved around the question of ‘having’ and ‘not-having’. Man ‘has it’ (the penis), but is threatened by castration. Woman ‘has not got it’, but wants it (in the form of a man or a child). However, Freud came to acknowledge that this logic does not fully account for sexual difference and its manifestations in the clinic. As a legacy of his inquiry he left a question: what does the woman want?
The fact that no conclusive and lasting answer has been found to this question points to some fundamental difficulties with definitions of femininity. In the field of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan's structural theory leads towards a closer understanding of the nature of these difficulties. Lacan developed and refined his views on the problem of femininity throughout his works and his teaching without, however, presenting them anywhere in the form of a unified and comprehensive theory. Colette Soler has brought together his thoughts on the subject of ‘woman’, paying special attention to his most important texts on this theme: Encore