Early Female Sexuality1

This lecture is intended to be the first of a series of exchange lectures between Vienna and London which your Vice-President, Dr. Federn, has proposed for a special purpose. For some years now it has been apparent that many analysts in London do not see eye to eye with their colleagues in Vienna on a number of important topics: among these I might instance the early development of sexuality, especially in the female, the genesis of the super-ego and its relation to the Oedipus complex, the technique of child analysis and the conception of a death instinct. I use the phrase 'many analysts' without attempting to enumerate these, but it is evident that there is some danger of local views becoming unified to such an extent as to enable people to speak of a Vienna school or London school as if they represented different tendencies of a possibly divergent order. This, I am convinced, is in no wise true. The differences are of just that kind that go with imperfect contact, which in the present case are strongly contributed to by geographical and linguistic factors. The political and economic disturbances of the past few years have not brought London and Vienna nearer to each other. Many English analysts do not read the Zeitschrift, and still fewer Vienna analysts read the Journal. And I have not as yet succeeded in making the interchange of translations between the two as free as I could wish. It is true that German work has much freer access to the Journal than English work has to the Zeitschrift, but this one-way avenue, far from perfect as it is, is not at all a satisfactory