Concepts of Vaginal Orgasm

On this special occasion in the history of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis there are few psychoanalysts still active among us who have been subscribers ever since Volume 1 appeared. My own regular subscription began with Volume 13, which contained the translation of Freud's paper, 'Female Sexuality' (1931).

If one takes a remote bird's-eye view of the most obvious changes in the climate of psychoanalytic interest and opinion that have made themselves felt in the pages of the Journal, and elsewhere, over these 38 years, one may think perhaps of the controversy between Freud and Jones over female psychosexual development; the full unfolding of the Kleinian theory and its applications, with its stress on the earliest stages and the most primitive fantasies and relationships to breast and to mother, together with the prolonged controversy resulting therefrom; and the development of the structural theory from the basis laid down by Freud, a development which owes much to Anna Freud. The further extension of ego psychology initiated by Hartmann before he left Vienna and greatly elaborated in America by himself and others is less adequately represented in the Journal, since much of this work was published elsewhere.

However, these main streams by no means constitute the whole of psychoanalytic progress over the years, even if they are the most purely psychoanalytic. Technical progress in extra-analytic fields has revealed various facts highly relevant to psychoanalysis, though unknown at the time of Freud's work. I am thinking in particular of recent work on sleep and dreaming which should take us back to reconsider The Interpretation of Dreams and the 'Project' that preceded it; and I think also of the remarkable findings resulting from Masters & Johnson's researches into the anatomy and physiology of the human sexual response, as well as the detailed and complex knowledge that has been accumulating recently of the process of sexual differentiation in the h