Belladonna

The “Taboo of Virginity” (1918/1957c) is one of Freud's strangest texts. It is conceptually at odds with much of the rest of his theory; its argument is convoluted; its form is a hodgepodge mixture of sources from anthropology, social psychology, comparative religion, dreams culled from clinical vignettes, and literature; its metapsychological claims are often astonishing, paradoxical, and at times even in direct contradiction with many essential points of his own previously established theoretical axioms.

“The Taboo of Virginity” is officially classified as the third installment in the series on psychosexual life that goes by the name Contributions to the Psychology of Love. But this third essay is dramatically different from the first two in several important respects. Whereas in the first two essays Freud makes some general claims about the psychology of love by showing how unconscious Oedipal conflicts determine some seemingly inappropriate erotic object choices made by men, the third essay, “The Taboo of Virginity,” ends up being about a kind of general structure that leads to a catastrophic failure of both love and sexuality in women. Frigidity in women, which Freud mentions in passing in the second essay as an epiphenomenal effect of cultural restrictions, here takes on a new quasi-ontological psychosexual function and meaning. Frigidity is the name for the symptom in female sexuality for which the underlying cause is “penis-envy.” In this essay, penis envy assumes, arguably for the first time in Freud's writings, a pivotal role in resolving his difficulties in assimilating female sexuality into the Oedipal narrative that is essential to the larger metapsychology.

Moreover, unlike the first two essays in the collection, which take the psychology of the individual man as their object of study, in “The Taboo of Virginity” the virgin occupies a liminal space between individual and group psychology: she connects the sexual dynamic within the family to the realms of