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PERIODICALLY THROUGHOUT HISTORY men have posed the riddle "What do women want?" Some have even claimed to know the answer, including the writer of Genesis who condemned Eve for placing desire for knowledge above devotion to her mate and her creator. So, too, the writer of the fifteenth century poem, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, answered decisively: "Above all things … women desire sovereignty" (1956, p. 62). To the extent that knowledge is power, these ancient answers are closely related. In a time more beleaguered by ambiguity and self doubt, Freud acknowledged the question to be beyond his powers of insight and ingenuity. Though he made a multitude of denigrating statements about female character and desire, he said with uncharacteristic modesty to Marie Bonaparte, "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my 30 years research into the feminine soul is what does a woman want?" (Jones, 1955, Vol. 2, p. 421).
Considering the question from my own perspective, as a middle aged, middle class, white female, and psychoanalyst/teacher/supervisor in the year 1991, I found myself in an emotional and conceptual swamp. At first eager and stimulated, then irritated, then bewildered, and at last curiously apathetic, I said to myself, "This question is impossible to answer intelligently." But, unwilling to surrender, I continued defiantly, "What makes men ask such idiotic questions?" This one is a red flag to me with its implication that women are a separate species whose murky inner workings defy analysis by men's logic and reason. And, compounding the questioner's sin, it assumes we all want alike. Who would be arrogant or imprudent enough to reply with some unitary formulation? How could this be answered without considering issues of time, place, social class, race, ethnicity and the vicissitudes of individual identity?
The question is false to the complexities of human character