The issues discussed in this paper arise from the context not only of modern feminist psychoanalytic debate but also from my direct involvement in teaching psychoanalytic theory on an MA Course in Women's Studies at Anglia University in Cambridge. My paper therefore has been written very much with women readers in mind; women who are interested in the different varieties of feminism and the structuring of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ but who also have an interest in the role of psychoanalytic theory as a source of ideas and explanations in this and other areas.

We still have no single satisfactory theory of the construction of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ Socialisation theory which deals with consciousness cannot, on its own, offer an adequate explanation for the construction of sexual identity, and the two major strands of psychoanalytic theory based on the concept of the unconscious, Freudian theory and Object-Relations theory, provide us with important insights about different kinds of things—nurture and sexuality—but